The Adblock War: For or Against

[Deleted]

I don't.

Anyone whose website's business model relies on ads to be viable has a shit business model, so I don't care if these websites die.

The only alternative model is a paywall locker.

[Zenotetsuken]

Sometimes I turn it off for Twitch, but only for the casters that do like a 3-5 min commercial break every hour or so, and take a break themselves so you never miss anything interesting or important. It allows me to support them with some ad revenue, and myself time to get up and do w/e I need to. Those casters that just let a bot decide when to play ads can kiss my ass, because they usually play 2 to 3 video ads every 10-15 mins, and always seem to go off when something interesting happens.

One of these days websites will have to break down and accept LESS revenue from ads, in order to get MORE revenue. If these sites keep blanketing their pages in obnoxious and uncurated ads, more and more people will start to use some sort of adblock, which will end up making them even less money. The war against ads is going to get worse before it gets better.

I feel that eventually we will create a far more civil and responsible relationship between websites and their users, but until that time comes I am 100% pro-AdBlock.

[ringpriest]

The only alternative model is a paywall locker.

Not remotely true. There are donations, sponsorships, merch, patreon, and the host just considering the site a worthwhile expense (for a variety of reasons), among many others.

The ad-supported web is dead, just like the coral reefs - the only question is how long it takes everyone to notice, and what they do about it.

[Kujako]

The only alternative model is a paywall locker.

Nonsense. Just off the top of my head I can think of several alternatives including sponsored content.

[imabanana]

The only alternative model is a paywall locker.

You seem to lack creativity then

[Deleted]

Not remotely true. There are donations, sponsorships, merch, patreon, and the host just considering the site a worthwhile expense (for a variety of reasons), among many others.

The ad-supported web is dead, just like the coral reefs - the only question is how long it takes everyone to notice, and what they do about it.

You say "remotely true" like I hadn't spent the best part of fifteen years trying to make money out of the web and don't have a very keen sense of how profitable those things are.

Donations and Patreon are worth nothing. When Cobrak hit 50K subs he was making less than minimum wage out of Patreon. Without the adsense income he'd be making the same as a burger flipper, and he's in the top 0.1% of the youtube population. Merchandising is only viable for a certain type of audience. If you do "how to" stuff, educational stuff, anything without a visible brand and personality then you can't do that.

By contrast you could make a living off youtube or similar site with as little as 1000 subs if you can extract a premium from your audience. I could have made about6 $1000 a month flogging hunter debuff hacks last year had I actually chosen to sell, which is insane for a small channel. That's where all this is going. No one is making any money out of non-paid content without insane leverage of numbers. That's fine if your one of the online glitterati but for actual human beings your solutions are not remotely profitable to bother with.

This is just video gaming, every other field I've been involved with has been much, much worse.

Almost every site out there would gain financially from charging people a direct debit for a few dollars a month. Those things are impossible to cancel. No one ever bothers. The amounts stack up fast. It is easy to bait people in and keep them there.

I think your last suggestion is where you really want to go with this: you want content providers to work for free for you, and dress it up with some impractical utopian nonsense which coincidentally requires you to pay nothing and watch no adverts. One day you'll wake up, it'll be 1995 again, and no one will want to give you anything for free any more. And then it will be too late to do anything because everyone will remember that an advertising supported model didn't work.

[Doctor Amadeus]

I love when people always bitch about fucking poll options, " How come there is no Vegan option at Outback Steakhouse?" Maybe it's just not a fucking option and you go with what is available, or move on.

[Adp]

As soon as ads started having sound they crossed a line. Now look how far they've taken it. 5 min adverts for 30 second videos, ads that you have to interact with, ads that pop up in the middle of the screen and make the entire website go dark, ads that have hidden malicious programs, ads that have no discernible way to be closed.

Go back to those innocuous, silent banner type adds and then we'll talk.

[x] Pro Adblock

[glo]

I think a lot of people here are misunderstanding.

The rumors OP is referring to suggest that Google will start actually rendering the ads into the video itself. For example, a content creator uploads a 2:30 video. Google then renders their 30 second ad into the video itself, making the new video 3:00. Then they would likely lock the video player for 30 seconds to prevent skipping until the original content creator's video starts playing.

No amount of adblock or adblock updates would stop that.

[Kujako]

I think a lot of people here are misunderstanding.

The rumors OP is referring to suggest that Google will start actually rendering the ads into the video itself. For example, a content creator uploads a 2:30 video. Google then renders their 30 second ad into the video itself, making the new video 3:00. Then they would likely lock the video player for 30 seconds to prevent skipping until the original content creator's video starts playing.

No amount of adblock or adblock updates would stop that.

I kind of doubt it'll happen like that, if for no other reason then they would have to constantly re-render the videos to replace the ads. What's more, unless they fundamentally change their UI and API you can just create a link to after where the ads were inserted.

[ringpriest]

You say "remotely true" like I hadn't spent the best part of fifteen years trying to make money out of the web and don't have a very keen sense of how profitable those things are.

Donations and Patreon are worth nothing. When Cobrak hit 50K subs he was making less than minimum wage out of Patreon. Without the adsense income he'd be making the same as a burger flipper, and he's in the top 0.1% of the youtube population. Merchandising is only viable for a certain type of audience. If you do "how to" stuff, educational stuff, anything without a visible brand and personality then you can't do that.

By contrast you could make a living off youtube or similar site with as little as 1000 subs if you can extract a premium from your audience. I could have made about6 $1000 a month flogging hunter debuff hacks last year had I actually chosen to sell, which is insane for a small channel. That's where all this is going. No one is making any money out of non-paid content without insane leverage of numbers. That's fine if your one of the online glitterati but for actual human beings your solutions are not remotely profitable to bother with.

This is just video gaming, every other field I've been involved with has been much, much worse.

Almost every site out there would gain financially from charging people a direct debit for a few dollars a month. Those things are impossible to cancel. No one ever bothers. The amounts stack up fast. It is easy to bait people in and keep them there.

I think your last suggestion is where you really want to go with this: you want content providers to work for free for you, and dress it up with some impractical utopian nonsense which coincidentally requires you to pay nothing and watch no adverts. One day you'll wake up, it'll be 1995 again, and no one will want to give you anything for free any more. And then it will be too late to do anything because everyone will remember that an advertising supported model didn't work.

It's not that donations and patreon are worth nothing, it's that I think we're talking about different things. You can absolutely use them to pay your hosting and bandwidth costs, and a little more besides. You seem to be talking about making a living on providing web-content, which is mostly non-viable. Like poetry publishing, there are far more people who want to make a living doing whatever they like on the web, than there is demand for supporting that market. You can absolutely use a website to support a real product: webcomics and author blogs are a perfect example, where the successful ones make money by selling books (and merch). In those cases, the website is effectively advertising, supported by the real product, with most users as free riders (but the free riders are what create the market for the product in the first place...).

The problem is that people aren't willing to (and in reality can't) pay "a few dollars a month" for each of the dozens of sites they frequently visit - they'll go without (or go to a different site that seems free). Web advertising (and to a lesser extent, much of the whole damn web) is a fucking bubble fueled by investors with too much money and no real place to put it (which is going to come as a real shock when the free money eventually dries up) - the real, consumer-driven demand for web content is miniscule in comparison. If a good chunk of the web tried to shift to it, they'd rapidly find that spending collapsed down to a handful of websites per individual, divided between entertainment, actual news, infotainment, social networking (and permutations thereof), and shopping.

(YMMV on all the above, obviously. )


Edited to add: what I think we're going to see as the money goes out of the web is that everything will turn into the equivalent of monetized games - broken functionality and psychological scams everywhere. How long that state can last before crashing itself... idk. The big players like Google and Facebook love this future, though - they'll set up their comparatively cheap, safe, and useable walled gardens and use them to extract profits while buying protecting their oligopolies (probably by outlawing evolution - invest now in the Google-Creationist alliance!)

[Cosmic Janitor]

I have no problem with allowing adds before videos, I usually white-list sites like that. I do have issues with intrusive, virus distributing, flash advertisements though.

[yetgdhfgh]

I use adblock cause i hate when im playing wow and im on a webpage that suddenly starts playing a video commercial and the sound is usually really loud and i have to alt tab to turn it off.

It really annoys the fuck out of me and also if i hear another fucking Geico ad again im gonna go outside and kill a real fucking Gecko! (not really but damn do i hate those ads)

[Beet]

If I want to read an advertisement about a product, I'll look for it myself.

No you wouldn't. No one ever is going to google "Latest Tidy Cats ad July 2015" out of interest of that product. Just saying. I do agree with you though. Fuck ads. I use AdBlock Plus and I never take it off.

It's funny though when I think back to how bad ads once were in the 90s. I would have given anything for an ad block back then. Pop ups that would come up umpteen times everytime you'd close one. Oh man, bad times.

At least we had Bonzi Buddy to say dirty words out loud for us.

[Conspicuous Cultist]

I actually don't mind ads in videos like I see a couple of youtubers doing in promotional deals and I'm not really against s ads, although I'm an unemployed guy in his 20s so I don't think I fit in anyone's demographics for selling things.

Just not really a fan of malware and auto-playing HD ads that are in the background siphoning from my 1.0MB/s connection.

Speaking of such, I feel sorry for the 3% of the MMO-champ population that has to put up with pop ups.

[Gestopft]

Screw advertisements and screw companies that think they are entitled to show them. I do not have to listen to the things you want me to hear.

You mean the companies that pay so you can get content for free?

I don't like ads, and I don't care for corporate interests, but whining about the people who pay for your content makes you one that's acting entitled, not them. Side note: Youtube ads aren't even all that bad: anyone who tries to watch game highlights on mlb.com will know what I mean.

[Cosmic Janitor]

You mean the companies that pay so you can get content for free?

I don't like ads, and I don't care for corporate interests, but whining about the people who pay for your content makes you one that's acting entitled, not them. Side note: Youtube ads aren't even all that bad: anyone who tries to watch game highlights on mlb.com will know what I mean.

Most of us still probably remember TV and how bad advertisement can get.. 7 minutes of mental diarrhea for every 15-25 minutes of content.

[Flutterguy]

I use adblock for security purposes. YouTube and such can fuck right off.

[Slant]

Most of us still probably remember TV and how bad advertisement can get.. 7 minutes of mental diarrhea for every 15-25 minutes of content.

One reason why I abandoned TV altogether.