The Brewing Battle Over Adblock
blog.fairblocker.comI don't object to advertising per se. There are many good reasons for advertising. Without advertising, how would I know what to purchase?
I have two gripes:
One is tracking. Most ads are served by a central server, Google AdSense for example. If I didn't block AdSense, then the AdSense server would know about all the websites I visit.
If all those exact same ads were served by the same servers that served the websites they appeared on, AND if my visits to those sites weren't reported back to Google, I'd be completely cool with it.
More recently my gripe is obtrusive ads. I'm cool with a banner on tops or bottom or on the side, but quite commonly I'll try to read an article, but then before I can do so I get a popup that either solicits a facebook like, or my email for their newsletter.
If I haven't even read the article yet, how can I know I like it? I might be cool to give you email, I might even enjoy your newsletter but to make a rational decision I need to read your article FIRST.
Finally, the last few years I have been experiencing brain seizures. It's not epilepsy but my own experience of them is somewhat like epilepsy. I don't really know but speculate that the world wide web is causing my seizures.
It is for the specific reason that I want to eliminate my seizures that I installed noscript recently.
Considering the widespread disapproval of the pop-ups of yore, it is crazy how obtrusive ads are on such a rise right now. I think that speaks volumes as to the ad supported business model - if you have to sell 50+% of your real estate to advertisers to stay in business, something is wrong.
There are plenty of good reasons to run an ad blocker and I think yours makes it a necessity. Even "decent" ads from well known brands can be unsavorily flashy and thus dangerous to someone with epilepsy.
I am deeply concerned about the increasing quantity and intrusiveness of ads.
Not simply because I find them unpleasant or obtrusive, or that others do. Rather I am convinced that they are a "coal mine canary" that is warning us of impending economic collapse.
A few days ago, via HN I found a chart of advertising spend as a proportion of the GDP since the 1920s or so. It is just about always 2%. So if the economy is booming, then advertising will boom in a sense, but at no more than 2% of the economy.
The problem we've got is that it is very easy to make a new website, and it is not hard at all to attract people to it, however it is quite difficult to come up with ways to monetize a website other than by publishing ads.
Consider eCommerce - you need warehouses, people to ship the product, you have to deal with charging credit cards and so on.
But sites like mine, I just publish lots of articles and essays. When I first tried adsense, within just a couple of hours I could tell that I would earn three grand that month. Signing up for adsense then implementing it in my website was quite a lot easier than it would have been to monetize my site by selling a physical product.
Key to my concern is that the number of websites is growing far faster than either the GDP or the population. So there is less and less advertising money to go around.
The typical response is to try harder to convince visitors to your site to click your ads. Hence we have what I first complained about - "Like us on Facebook" before I can even find out whether I actually do like the content.
Eventually this house of cards is going to break down, in my specific case I have installed Privacy Badger and noscript, and I also blackhole analytics servers in my hosts file: "127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com".
In many respects a good solution is to operate a website just like my own: I don't use it to earn money. I earn money by working as a coder, however my site helps me to promote myself.
But there are many sites with very sizeable costs. Look how much it costs to serve Facebook.
Yesterday's morality of ad block thread generated hundreds of comments arguing every direction of the ad block debate.
I wrote this piece to cover the current reality - there is no discussion of the morality - and to acknowledge that our team is focusing on helping to create an ad-free business model for content creators, by giving users the ad blocker they want.
I'm looking for feedback. Why is this a bad idea? Why is it a good idea?