Yes, and in case you craved more in-fighting now that Games of Thrones is gone, there’s a battle between uBlock and uBlock Origin, one of which was spun off from the other by former founders, with each alleging the other is a sellout. Or something like that.
2 Likes
Not in the slightest.
Sorry but I never agreed to your deal.
9 Likes
Yeah, but that’s one of the main selling points of modern Internet ads. If advertisers could have tracked you back in 1930 when they were advertising Ovaltine on the radio, they would have. Now that they can track you, they’re not going to give it up. Advertisers want to be able to (1) know precisely how successful their ad campaigns are, and (2) be able to efficiently direct ads to people, creating a high probability someone will buy the thing advertised. Tracking serves both of those purposes, and has the incidental effect of (3) creating a great profit center in selling the data collected to other companies interested in serving purpose number two.
I agree that tracking invades privacy, but it’s not going away.
1 Like
And those advertisers paying $0.028 per person reached may have been a reasonable rate in 1930. But it’s not reasonable now. Google and other ad providers are pulling in billions of dollars a year from ads, benefiting even more from their analytics, taking the money of shady malvertisers, and paying out practically nothing.
I was about the peace out of this thread and agree to disagree, but your thoughtful reply deserves a response. Then I’m outta here because everyone (including me) is pretty dug in at this point, and it’s Friday FFS.
There’s no avoiding the fact that most sites depend on ad revenue to pay their bills. If I block ads, I’m taking all the good they have they have to offer, increasing their costs, and giving nothing in return. If there were a better way right now, people would be doing it. Based on the general politics of the publishers of this site, I’m pretty sure they’re not exactly psyched to run ads, but they’ve decided it’s the best method for them. I’m sure the merch store does OK, but I bet the vast majority of their revenue comes from ads.
BTW, I totally agree: modern ads are broken for the reasons you and others have outlined. It seems like most of us are cool with sites making money, we just disagree on the method. And then there’s the separate issue of the ethics of circumventing ads. Setting all that aside, I hope someday we figure out something better that addresses the security/privacy concerns you and others have but still get the creators some $ for their work.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.
4 Likes
The publishers of this site use sponsored content and affiliate links as well, because they know the userbase is very likely to be tech-literate and concerned enough to use adblockers.
4 Likes
To me, well not at all. Seriously. I am good at filtering it out mentally anyway and now with the ad blocker things are so much better cause page loads are way faster and no stupid autoplay video ads either.
Advertising works on most people. Because online ads are so cheap to fling into the aether, the click-through rate doesn’t have to be very high at all in order for the client to make money. With that said, it would be interesting to know what advertisers think is the tipping point where ad blocking begins to interfere with revenue. I’ve heard that about 25% of web users have ad blockers, and given that media companies are panicking now, maybe that’s the magic number.
1 Like
I hope so. I honestly have no problem with simple pics and text even ones that change regularly. It is the autoplay video and huge animated gifs that get well annoying, Seriously, want me not to buy a product, all you gotta do is make the ad autoplay video or audio and I will avoid said product. And all that bloat is a serious issue for mobile users on phones where data is not unlimited and not cheap. Add in the other mentioned reasons above and well yeah using an ad blocker is just safe and sane computing.
Heck as I stated earlier where I used to work flat out blocks a ton of ad providers at the corporate firewall level the traffic never gets to the workstations just a ‘site blocked’ in the ad space… If they have to do that then there are some serious problems with the online ad industry.
3 Likes
You should watch my zero tech savvy mother in law click through website ads and popup ads. She might click on something that falsely promises her what she is looking for, or maybe just click on something accidently, and the tidal wave of frustration and ads just continue to build. It’s sad watching her get lost in the ads, but it is also sad thinking about this being a business for some people. I can understand why the ad people and site owners have disdain for the end consumer, it is practically required to put their users through this kind of abuse just for a buck.
4 Likes
I’m too full of contempt to have any pity for the people who make a living doing ads.
4 Likes
There’s a special place in hell for companies whose ad revenue relies on users being confused and misled.
10 Likes
Why do you watch her do this instead of installing uBlock Origin for her?
6 Likes
It’s all about ethics in online journalism.
7 Likes
The first time I saw it happening was the last time 
12 Likes
That’s a good son-in-law!
5 Likes
You didn’t answer my question. Are you against the concept of time shifting TV shows to skip advertisements?
12 Likes
If he isn’t a hypocrite, the answer is “yes” since that would be “violating the contract” and “stealing tv.”
6 Likes
Indeed. I work with vulnerable people, and regularly fix their utterly fucked PCs over & above doing my job, because the state of a laptop belonging to someone who has learning difficulties and has no clue what adblockers are is parlous. I see adblockers as vaccines to tyr and stem the tide of awful. If you’re one of the 25% using them, then at this point you’re at least trying to provide some herd immunity for the horrible crap they carry.
13 Likes
I learned a new word today. Neat!
5 Likes
