With all the fervor around ad-blocking what I fail to see is how do you propose those sites that you visit, read their content to make money ? Are you willing to pay every site you visit or encourage them to put up pay walls ??
What's wrong with the "old" way, where you visit a Mopar automotive related website and saw Mopar car part ads? Or when you visit a computer magazine and saw ads for computer parts? Or when you went to NYT and saw basic shit like paper towels and fall fashion?
It became a problem when everyone and their sister started needing to know what kinds of kinks I'm into just to sell me dish detergent.
I've been predicting for a while now that sites would fall back to the old television show model "RockAuto presents MustangForums.com" or something to that effect.
Instead, we get a dancing Albert Einstein begging us to take IQ tests.
This is in fact very popular among both YouTube channels and podcast producers. It makes a lot of sense for an advertiser to pick a producer who matches their market and have that producer create an in content advertisement. I am fine with this. The content producer wins, the advertiser wins, and the viewer wins by getting better ads by someone they want to support.
One big problem with entirely static ads is that websites are global but the ads running on them are for brands that are likely local (at least to a specific country.) If I visit the NYT website in e.g. Norway, should I still see ads for an American brand of paper towel that doesn’t exist here; or should I see ads for Norway paper towel brands?
The flip-side of this is that I’ve noticed that YouTube shows me PSAs from my own municipal government (“there’s an election soon” ads, “we’re building a new piece of civil infrastructure” ads, etc.) I actually kind of like that; I don’t have cable, so it’s not like I would see them anywhere else.
The entirely-static ads model does work when the consumption of the media is entwined with the consumption of the advertised brands, though. For example, a podcast can certainly advertise its own tour, since—given that you’re listening to the podcast—you likely want to see the podcaster speak in person, even if you can’t make it there.
Or, of course, if a (global) website is just advertising another (global) website. The NYT can advertise Amazon just fine.
> If I visit the NYT website in e.g. Norway, should I still see ads for an American brand of paper towel that doesn’t exist here; or should I see ads for Norway paper towel brands?
That's still possible with static ads. The server can simply lookup your country from your IP address and serve the relevant ad, without tracking you at all.
This is a good question that I've thought about a lot because the services who advertise with us are regional.
We fully control and host our static ads and try to keep them high quality, so I've decided that minimally using IP to loosely serve a more relevant ad is okay. MaxMind offers a downloadable Geo IP database that we use to do this and are not needing a 3rd party service for this.
This not necessarily a problem. There's nothing to stop the website operator calling out to an ad provider, with the ip/location of the user, and getting an ad to embed.
The upside for the user is that location and whatever the one site is able to determine about the user is all that can be shared. If the user hasn't logged in with their real name - that probably isn't much.
The issue is that you can make considerably more money using ads that 'track' you.
So instead of one ad being enough to pay for your content, you have to fill your website with banner ads, embedded ads, scroll over ads, animated ads, etc etc.
It's a slippery slope, more people use adblockers causing content creators to add more advertisements to generate the same amount of income. More people are bothered by the increase in ads, and download adblockers themselves. Rinse and repeat until ad supported content is unrealistic for all but the biggest of websites.
And I'm pretty sure even checking location is controversial. I've at least seen it included as part of tracking in the past.
> (“there’s an election soon” ads, “we’re building a new piece of civil infrastructure” ads, etc.) I actually kind of like that; I don’t have cable, so it’s not like I would see them anywhere else.
I don't have cable, either, but I do have a pair of rabbit ears to keep up with local news via OTA broadcasts.
We post about office design and our ads are primarily for office furniture or other services related to the industry. We also self-host the ads which are non-animated jpgs and sell them without using any ad networks.
We started doing that too, in addition to Google ads. We deal directly with the advertiser, self host a specific ad for them. It's MUCH more profitable than Google ads. Will phase out the Google Ads soon.
Minimal work involved. A bunch of emails back and forth, where we tell them our ad size if they provide an image. Or they provide a logo and we manually ad the text if they aren't technical enough to provide a custom image.
What type of overhead is associated with this? Are you experiencing an increase in server costs? What about the resources it takes to build those relationships, maintain the content, or manage the infrastructure?
We use WordPress and plugins which offer these features so hosting and server costs are pretty minimal.
It definitely takes time and work to develop and maintain relationships, but we also get to keep 100% of the revenue. In some ways we've just decided that ownership of the relationship and process is more important than being able to quickly slap some Adsense code up on the site.
That said, we also used Adsense early on, but have been doing this for ~5 years.
I'm also wondering how revenue compares. Every one clearly seems to think that "perosnalized" ads are worth more; can you offer any insight into if you make more or less with personalized vs your approach?
People seem to have forgotten that users are most likely to be interested in what they are currently reading, because it is what their mind is currently focused on.
You can get a sense of advertising fees by looking at comparable newspaper ads and industry trade magazines. Even take a look at billboard or radio ads. Custom ads will be an order of magnitude higher that what you get from Google.
I wish I had a deep and thoughtful answer, but a simplistic one is that we do get to keep 100% of the revenue for the ads we sell so in that sense we make more.
Because our content is so specific, ads which are relevant to the content end up targeting the user because you wouldn't be spending time on the site unless you care about the content.
Initially I just set a price I thought was fair and have adjusted accordingly as we've grown. I do recall that the amount we received from Adsense was less than what we ended up choosing to charge for the same space.
We also sell the space per month as opposed to based on impressions or clicks so it makes it a little more straightforward.
1. It facilitates a world in which only large content providers, who can afford to individually sell ads to advertisers, to exist.
There's a lot of overhead to ad sales and individual companies do not want to work with 1,000,000 providers, they want to work with 10-100.
2. It's substantially less efficient and only works for brand advertising or mass-market direct-response advertising.
One of the greatest things that Facebook and ad retargeting enabled was the rise of direct-response brands. Previously if you were selling a niche product - and most larger brands started out with a niche product - it was very difficult to reach an early audience who would be interested in purchasing your product. Facebook and Google flipped this on it's head, enabling millions of businesses to more efficiently reach customers. Facebook alone made the direct-to-consumer brand explosion we've seen over the last 10 years possible.
Tracking ads are collecting data on people without their explicit consent or knowledge. The trade in bulk personal data is a stain on the internet.
I am quite content to block these sorts of adverts and I'm not worried by the site's loss of revenue. I am not responsible for their slimy choice in business model.
Let's get back to context based adverts like DuckDuckGo use. There was no need for the internet to take this path - it only did so to rapidly monetise after the dot-com bust blew their VC funded rapid growth plans out of the water.
> There was no need for the internet to take this path - it only did so to rapidly monetise after the dot-com bust blew their VC funded rapid growth plans out of the water.
No need, aside from the trillions of dollars of economic value it created and hundreds of thousands of previously impossible businesses it created.
I don't have to care about if they make money or not.
That's not my business. If they want to make money, they'll shift to other profit models that don't involve intrusive tracking and annoying advertisements.
I support them, in the sense that they don't particluarly bother me. When a site asks me for money to read an article or to subscribe I tend to just close the browser tab and do something else.
The thing is, most articles are a distraction, a diversion. Something I do instead of the thing I should be doing and as such they are very very low value to me.
If the site maintains a standard level of quality of content where their paywall is worth paying, sure. But I think the vast majority of sites (think your average Medium blog, many 'news' sites, or tabloid sites) don't meet that standard, and are probably terrified of the thought of nobody willingly signing up for their subscriptions.
The "fervor" you mention has more to do with ads becoming ever more intrusive, third party content slowing down page loads, consuming bandwidth, and potentially being used for malware distribution than it does with wanting to take food off another person's table.
I regularly try browsing without adblocking on, and it's a constant nightmare. If sites held their advertising networks accountable to any reasonable set of standards, they wouldn't be in this situation.
The content I appreciate, I have found ways to support it.
Few of the important things on the Web are spyvertising-supported, or wouldn't promptly be replaced by something community-driven and free if they went away or became paid-only (stackoverflow, for instance). It's mostly junk.
[EDIT] to expand, I think the piles of spyvertising money funding sites & services is a big part of the decline of truly free sites and open protocols, and make running a paid site (or app, or whatever) harder since you're competing with "free" (but spying on you). Less incentive to use them, less incentive to contribute to them. The whole system's perverse and harmful and it would 100% not be the end of the world, or the end of nice things for free/cheap, if it just disappeared tomorrow.
I bought a TV that, because of the pihole, I know phones home approximately once every thirty seconds about my viewing habits.
In the world we live in something like a pihole isn't an ideological position, it's a necessity to not have everything we do end up rolling into someone else's ad profile on my household.
blocking your TV from dialing home is reasonable. You have paid for the TV and thats the end of the transaction. It would be another story if you took the TV for free in exchange for ads :)
I disable my adblocking for sites that use reasonable ads.
If I go to a site and am bombarded with pop ups, auto playing video ads, etc., then yeah why wouldn't I block them? With the malware and tracking that is often injected into ads I have no problem using my adblocker at all times and disabling it for pages that ask politely.
I'm happy to click on ads on sites that I frequent and would like to support. I think there's absolutely a balance here, and for many years the advertising industry has abused their stay.
Problem is you don’t know what’s reasonable and what’s not. It’s not based on how it looks. If may look reasonable and harmless but still send your IP and browser fingerprint to surveillance ads networks.
That's true. I suppose there's a certain amount of trust required. I really only ever disable it on sites that have a good track record with security and provide me enough value. There is risk involved though.
Have ads that relate to content, not to visitor. Like it was back in the days. When I visit a sci-fi site I'd like to see ads for sci-fi movies, books and paraphernalia. Not an ad for a pair of shoes I happened to search a week ago. Profiling is spooky and it's an offend to privacy. Not to mention that it doesn't work that well. Just because I search something on Google doesn't mean it's the only thing I'm interested in buying.
If sites actually curated the ads they display instead of saying "Give us money and we'll let you and whoever's paid you show whatever you want and run whatever scripts you want" they wouldn't get blocked by the pi-hole. I'm sick of malicious ads on even major sites because everyone's too lazy to give a damn.
Those websites designed a bad model for collecting revenue; it was based on the assumption that viewers would watch their ads out of some misplaced sense of guilt, while the ads and data collection become more and more intrusive.
It is not our responsibility to prop up their poor model. If these sites want to make their case that they won't survive without our eyes on their ads, then they can open their books for us to look at the costs and revenues and decide for ourselves whether or not we should help them. But at the end of the day, it is their problem, not ours.
I suppose for their whitelist/blacklist to work with regex matching the ads would have to be served from a similarly named domain. Like facebook.com vs ads.facebook.com, and you'd have to whitelist *facebook.com. And if they were getting ads externally you'd have to whitelist those ads for every site that you visit.
