No, they won’t. Advertisers will switch from obvious ads to more insidious “native advertising,” paying content creators to shill the product for them under the guise of “recommendations”. You know, like Boing Boing does.
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o_O
You weren’t aware that The Boing Boing Store has been shilling overpriced crap on the front page for, geez, I think the better part of a year?
(Uh-oh, I might be #DisappointedInBoingBoing)
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Much of the stuff in the Stack Social Store is/are crap, their shipping and return policies suck, and the suppliers are often reluctant to provide warranty service for items purchased through third-party sellers. I bought a Fez vape from SSS that turned out to be junk and I had a hell of a time getting warranty service. And back when I was young and foolish I bought one of those “lifetime” VPN subscriptions that turned out to be only for the lifetime of the company, which was measured in months. That said, I find that the Amazon advertorials are often interesting stuff and I have bought things from their links. @frauenfelder’s Amazon links are often interesting-- we apparently share similar tastes-- and @jlw says he tries and uses stuff before he’ll post a link to it. Can’t argue with that. And if you don’t have a BB t-shirt, you ought to get one… they trigger interesting discussions wherever you wear them, and it’s an easy way to help financially support our BBS habit.
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Naw dude, that’s what happens when you Deep BBS. That front page got too crowded for me years ago. There used to be a /page1 that had been set up but that wasn’t working when I last checked it a year ago.
You should skip the front page too, it’s nice down here.
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When advertisers stop trying to break my computer, I’ll stop blocking them.
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And what’s wrong with that? It’s not like those sort of posts are hard to identify and therefore easily avoidable. And the fact that you can usually comment on them is a nice feature (although I suspect the ad buyers may not appreciate seeing a thread of comments trashing their product).
I’m not using ad blockers to prevent websites from making money through advertising. I block ads because they are a well-known source of malware and even when they’re not they’re often just plain obnoxious and distracting and suck up gobs of bandwidth. I use NoScript for mostly the same reason – I don’t want my web browser talking to 30 different sites just to read a dumb article.
If websites start serving ads that use the same format as normal content but are free of all that baggage then bravo, ad blockers have done their job.
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Yep. “Here’s thing thing about Ad-blockers…” If your content isn’t unique, I will find it elsewhere, buh-bye.
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Funny to see this here. I just got into this with a Facebook friend (real-life: distant acquaintance) today. (Hi, Mike.)
I mentioned that I use an ad-blocker. He popped up in the replies to say that was unethical. I said I didn’t really think so, but it’s an old argument yadda yadda yadda. He said he’d never heard it and would I oblige him. So okay, I laid out some of the basics. Malware, tracking, privacy, my right to control what I see and what my computer says, bad practices, and so forth. And my justification was that I don’t try to do end runs around sites (like Wired, for example) that make ads contingent on getting content.
He called me a thief (“you thief”) and a privileged academic (“you sound like a privileged academic”) and got angrier from there. At this point I’m realizing there’s an idiot here and it’s me, because he was bristling for a fight from the start and I was too dumb to see it when I answered the “tell me why” question. Okay Mike, sorry you feel that way, close window.
But I didn’t really start feeling like an idiot until I recognized the implication of the fact that he works for Google. I think of him as some generic computer guy writing code or whatnot, but really he’s in the ad sales business. Here I am writing pages to explain that if websites don’t actively want my freeloading ass reading their pages anyway, they can keep me out with two lines of code, like about 0.1% of them do. But he doesn’t work for content providers; he works for the ad-server. So my mistake was forgetting there’s no getting anyone to understand what their salary requires that they don’t.
Which, incidentally, is why we’re not going back to the bad old days of unstoppable popups and walled gardens. The Mikes of the world notwithstanding, their bosses have mostly gotten with the program. It’s never going to be uncontested, but that’s okay.
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I had heard of it but never investigated it so shame on me. I’ll do that now. Thanks.
I recently created a Patreon account so I could throw a buck or two per month towards stuff I routinely consume (e.g SMBC) or just think deserve ongoing support (e.g. Dwarf Fortress) so I’m definitely making some effort.
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Oh, half the fun of BB is figuring out the angle on “recommendations!”
But if anyone’s listening, a request. Do more of that thing where you find a product you genuinely hate, trash it, and then provide an Amazon Affiliate link to it. That shit is hilarious AND informative, and, if I understand how the program works, you can still make a few bucks even if nobody buys the thing. (I’m serious. This is not snark or criticism. Please do this more.)
Someday someone’s going to invent a steampunk banana that’s also a deeply discounted VPN, and we’ll really hit the sweet spot.
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Mike sounds selfish. BB just asks that I buy a shirt, they see more money from that.
If Mike depends on leeching a tenth of a cent because his company is a middle man, well, sometimes people are going to just buy direct. Because that is a poor business practice to engage in.
They don’t make. They don’t create. They just put person a in touch with person b. Well, sometimes a already knows b.
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Look at it. Look at it privately!
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Any time you have a problem with our store message me directly. We all personally walk customer service issues we hear of thru Stack and never want an unhappy customer.
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Dunno about /page1 - you may be looking for http://boingboing.net/blog ?
That’s the only front door I’ve been using since the front page became selective and unpredictable.
I like the good old ‘river of news’ because I can tell when to stop scrolling when I’m doing a catch-up.
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Once again I need to mention https://boingboing.net/ascii is the one true way to view the main site.
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I’ve been using Privacy Badger for a while now, per Cory’s suggestion a while back. It has really done wonders for my internet life. A while back I used one of our machines that didn’t have it loaded and was appalled at the state of things.
When Wired pops messages like that, I say fair’s fair and go somewhere else. We read magazines and newspapers for years and I liked the ads just fine. Half the reason to read some magazines is for the ads. But when the ads start stalking you around the internet from site to site and learning about you, that’s no good.
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That’s right. They’ll be fine whether they get to infect my computer or my mind. Their durability has proven that. My absence from the equation brings me no guilt.
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That sparks an idea for an interesting tee shirt stating “I AM NOT YOUR VARIABLE”.
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Exactly this. I allow only specific sites, via whitelisting, that I directly want to support. And if ANY ad shows unwanted/inappropriate behavior, that site doesn’t ever get to serve ads to me again.
Vet your ads or get zero revenue. The 1st malware attack on my PC from a banner ad (on a perfectly legit site) was the last moment the internet got to serve me random ads.
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Vet your ads or get zero revenue.
This is so important for any content creator who wants adblockers to go away that I’m going to quote it.
Fuck it! I’m gonna quote it twice.
Vet your ads or get zero revenue.
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