Why don't you block ads?

I have blocked ads on every device I have ever had since 2006.
You have zero excuse.

I do block 'em.

What are these 'ad' things you speak of?

Got tired of waiting for a response to this question in the other topic?

OneEyedShinobi posted...

I do block 'em.

I hate topics with presumptuous titles like this.

I do

I do (on my computer, at least)

My excuse is that I mainly don't give a shit.

I grew up in the 80s, and am quite familiar with the concept of watching TV with ads. They don't bother me the same way they bother generations raised with the attention span of a goldfish.

I am also familiar with the concept of economics, and possess an awareness that the things I like do not magically fall out of the sky. Someone has to pay to make things, because otherwise, they don't get made. In theory , a willingness to watch 15 seconds worth of commercial (or gasp , occasionally more) helps pay for the things I like to get made, and more of the things I like to get made, and suddenly there's a lot of things I like to watch.

Part of the reason why we're in the mess we're in now is because when the Internet was built around the idea that click-through on pop-up ads would somehow pay all the bills, everyone started using pop-up blockers (and I 100% understand why - they were annoying as fuck and could contain malicious code). Then everyone realized that was wish magic, so we wound up seguing into the video ad driven model. But everyone ad blocking has made that less lucrative than it was supposed to be as well, which is a) why those ads are becoming so aggressive, and b) why sites are starting to try and find ways to disable ad blockers. We're entering the part of the phase parallel to when pop-up ads became their most annoying and intrusive.

But that's not sustainable, and is almost certainly going to collapse in exactly the same way pop-ups and "please click the ad link on my web page" did. Which is why the forced subscription model is becoming more and more popular, and why it's eventually going to either bleed us all dry via a thousand tiny cuts, or we're all going to have to get a lot more sanguine about piracy (at least until they start upping the criminal penalties for that and cracking down on it as well).

I mostly just let ads play because I don't lose my mind if I have to wait 20 seconds for my chosen video to start playing again. And because it does help support the ad-driven model.

I also kind of blame the rest of you blocking for things getting as bad as they are now in the first place.

i LiKe To SuPpOrT tHe CoMpAniEs

-something Ive actually seen people here say lmao.

sure why not have another topic on this

i make enough money and already don't buy much stuff, YouTube premium family is an insignificant cost for having flawless ad-free music and video experience across all devices I (or members of my YouTube premium family) are logged into, while providing revenue to channels I watch. I use it for music at the gym, podcasts during my commute, and recreation time on the couch. Multiple hours per day, for which I'm paying less than one dollar.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I also kind of blame the rest of you blocking for things getting as bad as they are now in the first place.

If advertisers had looked at ad blocking and said "oh, people don't like how intrusive and outright dangerous our ads are, we should scale that back so they don't mind them enough to block them," things would not have gotten so bad. Instead, they said "people don't like how intrusive and outright dangerous our ads are, let's make them even more intrusive and outright dangerous to try squeezing more revenue out of the people that aren't blocking yet," which was only ever going to result in more blocking. Blaming that escalation on people who wanted them to be less annoying just doesn't make sense.

As it stands, the FBI formally recommends that everyone use an ad blocker. Ads are a significant security risk, not just an annoyance/inconvenience, and they will remain as such until advertisers and the sites that sell space to them take accountability for the content they deliver. Until then, they will be blocked, no matter how many pleas of "you're killing the internet by blocking ads!" get thrown around.

Clench281 posted...

sure why not have another topic on this

i make enough money and already don't buy much stuff, YouTube premium family is an insignificant cost for having flawless ad-free music and video experience across all devices I (or members of my YouTube premium family) are logged into, while providing revenue to channels I watch. I use it for music at the gym, podcasts during my commute, and recreation time on the couch. Multiple hours per day, for which I'm paying less than one dollar.

I feel like uBlock should have hidden this post for me.

I bet that PO's and Clench's PCs are infested with infostealers for all of the ads they get.

OneEyedShinobi posted...

I do block 'em.

Clench281 posted...

sure why not have another topic on this

i make enough money and already don't buy much stuff, YouTube premium family is an insignificant cost for having flawless ad-free music and video experience across all devices I (or members of my YouTube premium family) are logged into, while providing revenue to channels I watch. I use it for music at the gym, podcasts during my commute, and recreation time on the couch. Multiple hours per day, for which I'm paying less than one dollar.

That's still technically blocking ads.

That's not blocking ads so much as it is avoiding the ad-driven version of the service. At a conceptual level, Clench is "blocking" Youtube ads the same way somebody who just doesn't use Youtube at all would.

adjl posted...

That's not blocking ads so much as it is avoiding the ad-driven version of the service. At a conceptual level, Clench is "blocking" Youtube ads the same way somebody who just doesn't use Youtube at all would.

This topic is about ads in general anyway so he probably uses it for other sites.

the idea that ads persist because we tried to block them is hilarious. they literally campaigned to make recording to beta/vhs/cassette illegal due to loss of ad revenue the second we were able to avoid them thanks to Sony. it was one of the biggest parts of their argument. the court very vociferously rejected that assertion and as we all know, universal, disney etc all went bankrupt the next day.

Yeah, I'm all for the sites I like making money, but when I don't use an adblocker I realize that advertisers have done absolutely nothing to make things better. Articles on my phone become completely unreadable because shit bounces around so much and I'd lose my mind if I lived like that all the time.

hockey7318 posted...

Yeah, I'm all for the sites I like making money, but when I don't use an adblocker I realize that advertisers have done absolutely nothing to make things better.

other than allow the site to persist? which it wouldn't if everybody did the same as you?

It's either an adblocker or I won't use an unusable site. Either way they aren't getting money from me if they have intrusive advertisements. If advertisers made things less obnoxious it wouldn't be an issue.

I happily block ads.
I don't like the idea that I'm obligated to have things sent through my internet connection, downloaded on my computer, and show up on my screen that I don't want.

If a site pesters me about it, I may for that site for that moment consider letting them ad me the easier path - and 27 years online have taught me to mentally block them out anyway - but in general, I have the ad blockers up. Any use of the phone to browse instantly makes the difference clear, but I take that not as a sign that I need to research how I can ad block there, but that I need to not browse on it. Tiny screen anyway.

The ad's content, no matter what it is, is very unlikely to interest me. I'm difficult to sell anything to.

Clench281 posted...

other than allow the site to persist? which it wouldn't if everybody did the same as you?

Reread what you quoted. He didn't say advertisers are doing nothing of value (to which your response would be an appropriate rebuttal), he said advertisers have done nothing to improve the situation that prompted him to start blocking in the first place (which your response does nothing to refute).

The way adblockers work, there's a dead-simple way for sites to evade them: sell ads.
Place a simple <A> tag on your site with a ?src query param and an image inside, adblockers won't mess with it unless the image is a handful of specfic sizes or has "ad" in the html somewhere.
No trackers, no external scripts, just a straightforward simple banner ad from 1995.

As-is, every site operator just sticks in whatever mystery <script> tag a 3rd-party ad-network provides, and expects it to be a magic money button. Those are trivially blocked.

Ah, but then sites would actually have to maintain their own ads and be responsible for their content. By renting out space that they let 3rd-party advertisers manage, they don't have to do anything and can pin the blame on that third party if one of the ads does something wrong. Presumably, advertisers are also willing to pay more for space that they control than for space that the site controls.

adjl posted...

Presumably, advertisers are also willing to pay more for space that they control than for space that the site controls.

I'd think the highly-specific game ads that appear in the margins of this site from time to time, pay much better than the random "this garbage mobile game may or may not be porn!" ads between posts.

Hard to say. Garbage mobile games that may or may not be porn tend to really benefit from getting eyes on them because they bait people into whaling with sneaky monetization tricks. They stand to gain a lot from advertising for that reason, so they likely pay more for those ads.