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Is Ad Filtering theft?
SmokeStacks
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Ad filtering, a procedure that removes or hides advertisements from loading or being displayed (traditionally) on a website, but for this discussion let's bring television and broadcast radio into the fold.
Advertisements on webpages use up bandwidth as well as screen real estate. Aggressive advertisements will do things such as play sounds or expand, requiring the user to close them manually. Some advertisements can be used as vectors for malware. Some website operators state that advertisements provide them with revenue that is necessary for the continued operation of their website. Some web operators claim that when you view their websites without giving them revenue from ads that you are committing content theft. Certain websites (including the PA forums) have had or do have policies that will infract or even ban users to admit to using ad blocking when visiting their website.
Blocking ads is also possible while watching television. PVRs have made it possible to record TV shows and then fast forward through commercial breaks. The old low-tech standby of simply getting up and doing something other than watching the television while commercials are playing is a slightly less elegant solution as well. With very few exceptions, networks rely on advertising dollars earned from commercials to provide revenue. It is similar to websites and web ads, only on a much larger scale.
Ad filtering on the radio is as simple as changing the channel, but the radio gets tricky because commercial free alternatives exist both in satellite (paid) radio and internet (free) radio.
So,
1.) Is blocking advertisements on webpages theft?
2.) Is blocking or ignoring advertisements on other forms of media like television or the radio theft?
3.) What is the difference, if any, between ignoring web ads versus ignoring ads on other forms of media?
4.) If ads are blocked on various forms of media, should a content creator be allowed to force the user to view ads using alternative means (video ads playing before a web video, "advertorials", product placement, advertisements showing up onscreen during a television show, etc)?
And finally,
5.) Do you have a personal responsibility to content creators in any medium to view advertisements that provide said creators with revenue?
Advertisements on webpages use up bandwidth as well as screen real estate. Aggressive advertisements will do things such as play sounds or expand, requiring the user to close them manually. Some advertisements can be used as vectors for malware. Some website operators state that advertisements provide them with revenue that is necessary for the continued operation of their website. Some web operators claim that when you view their websites without giving them revenue from ads that you are committing content theft. Certain websites (including the PA forums) have had or do have policies that will infract or even ban users to admit to using ad blocking when visiting their website.
Blocking ads is also possible while watching television. PVRs have made it possible to record TV shows and then fast forward through commercial breaks. The old low-tech standby of simply getting up and doing something other than watching the television while commercials are playing is a slightly less elegant solution as well. With very few exceptions, networks rely on advertising dollars earned from commercials to provide revenue. It is similar to websites and web ads, only on a much larger scale.
Ad filtering on the radio is as simple as changing the channel, but the radio gets tricky because commercial free alternatives exist both in satellite (paid) radio and internet (free) radio.
So,
1.) Is blocking advertisements on webpages theft?
2.) Is blocking or ignoring advertisements on other forms of media like television or the radio theft?
3.) What is the difference, if any, between ignoring web ads versus ignoring ads on other forms of media?
4.) If ads are blocked on various forms of media, should a content creator be allowed to force the user to view ads using alternative means (video ads playing before a web video, "advertorials", product placement, advertisements showing up onscreen during a television show, etc)?
And finally,
5.) Do you have a personal responsibility to content creators in any medium to view advertisements that provide said creators with revenue?
5½.) Would your answer to 5 change if viewing advertisements was detrimental to the end user? If a user is on a slow internet connection, should they be forced to view ads that, through loading, force the user to wait longer and have a lower quality experience? What if the user is on a strict data cap, and loading ad data could potentially put them over their limit and cost them money? What if the user is on a mobile connection and both of the above are true? What if the ads are so resource intensive that they cause detrimental effects?
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Incidentally, those kinds of ads are why I have AdBlock and NoScript for my browser.
Woah, woah, woah.
Is this true?
And I'm okay with that.
In general, I block ads, and whitelist sites that I trust and visit often. Working in IT, I've seen so many cases of those fake antivirus malwares getting sent through bad ads I won't ever go to random site without ads filtered. PA, Ars, other sites where I spend about 95% of my web browsing I unblock because I trust them to screen their ads, and also because I'm a heavy user.
Yeah I can get on board with this. I use different browsers. I use Chrome for the forums and a few other sites like financial stuff and I'm frankly just too lazy to install the ad block extensions. I use firefox for most of my other browsing, and have heavy ad-blocking and script-blocking, since I use that for all my general stuff (read: porn).
But Ads even on sites that should be clean, are often highjacked into serving up viruses, the Ad companies usually discover the bad ones quickly, but in that time it's seen by thousands of people.
That's where I differentiate between Internet and TV/Radio/Magazines/etc. Ads on the Internet can harm me, ones elsewhere just annoy me for a few seconds.
It reminds me of Gabe & Tycho's attitude to second-hand games.
There should be a new commandment:
Thou shalt consume shall be the whole of the law.
Of course it's not theft. That is nuts.
Pretty much.
Your business model is only my concern so far as it affects the production of content I like.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Is going to the bathroom during commercials theft?
The better question being:
Is Ad Filtering going to lead to a better long-term outcome for web users/consumers?
Yes. I got infracted twice in one thread some time ago for suggesting that another forum member use Adblock when the PA frontpage was running multiple flash ads that were crashing people's browsers. NeoGaf will ban people for using adblock, The Escapist made a big funk a while back for banning, unbanning, and then guilt tripping people who even mentioned using adblock. I don't play Minecraft but my understanding is that their forum will ban people for using it as well. Ars Technica temporaily blocked people who used adblock from accessing their site and then posted a diatribe about how adblocking was killing websites.
I could almost understand the approach from a website that stays afloat solely through ads, but when a website that exists solely to further exposure to a brand that sells actual merchandise that pulls in millions of dollars (like Minecraft or Penny Arcade forums), than the justification goes out the window for me.
The free market in action is probably the best way to describe it. If you want to use your website as a revenue stream and you can't find a way to monetize it that doesn't bother a significant portion of your viewers, that's your problem, not the consumer's.
I'd like to hear from someone who runs a website for a living, though.
It is the consumer's problem in the end though. Because the consumer is the final user and effected by the decisions made along the supply chain. It might not be direct, but it could very well work it's way around to being felt by the consumer in the end.
If adblocking is effective enough to kill the current business model, are you sure the next one will be better for you, the consumer?And why?
Ads can get worse then they are. Reminds me a bit of what I was watching on TV yesterday. Product placement is creeping it's way into programs as a way to boost funding outside the normal "sell ads during commercials" business model (movies too). The GF was catching up on her PVRed Bones last night and suddenly, in the middle of my murder mystery, David Boreanaz is spending 5 minutes talking with another main character about how awesome their fucking ... Honda Civic or something is. I'd watch a commercial to avoid shit this pathetic.
The networks (I don't know what the proper phrase is to describe them... maybe "Big TV"?) has been trying to make DVRs illegal since their inception. They've even come up with ideas like forcing people to watch commercials while they're fast forwarding through commercials and replacing one frame out of every thirty in a commercial with a frame of a different commercial so you see the different commercial when you're fast forwarding through the first commercial.
When the VCR was introduced the television and film industry went apeshit trying to get congress to make it illegal, but when they didn't get their way someone realized they could make money selling legitimate VHS copies of movies and TV shows, and the home video industry was born.
I suspect it will be a similar situation with the DVR, the same companies will be against it until they find a way to make money with it.
Yes. I got infracted twice in one thread some time ago for suggesting that another forum member use Adblock when the PA frontpage was running multiple flash ads that were crashing people's browsers.
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So you were telling people to block ads which are a source of income for the people who's free, ad supported site, you were saying that on. Not a big surprise. Any time I've ever had trouble with an ad on the main page, all I've had to do is report it in the bugs forum, and they remove it and have the supplier rework it.
Robert Khoo gets into PA's perspective and solicits input a few months back. I like being able to engage in dialogue about these things, because it allows deliberate input into the process, but that's not going to happen with big media (TV/Radio). On a website I can say "I'm not even seeing your ads, but I have bought $X of your merchandise" but that concept really doesn't translate.
Same with Flash, I've got all flash content blocked and have to click a little button to load it or have to whitelist a website. One browser crash too many and I installed the addon and never looked back.
So sorry everyone on the internet, I won't put up with known risks and I'm very sorry if that means that you can't continue putting stuff online I actually enjoy.
You could maybe argue that there was some kind of implied contract between the user and the website. I'm pretty sure that contract would need to be a lot more explicit to carry any kind of legal weight. Of course, a website can just ban any given user whenever it likes.
Legal arguments aside, I loathe advertising. I ordered a pizza online once and later received text message ads on my phone for said pizza place. I'm sure there's a box I could have (un)checked on a form somewhere to opt out of it, but I honestly don't give a damn. Those fucks aren't getting another cent from me as long as I live.
I'd be fine with much of the Internet switching to a subscription-based model if it meant an end to aggressive advertising. I'd gladly pay a monthly Google subscription to never have to see one of their ads when searching, or better yet to get some kind of anti-SEO algorithm so that I don't have to sift through pages of ads on any given search.
I think that between merchandise and running multiple expos Penny Arcade makes enough money that some people blocking their ads isn't going to be a big deal.
Secondly, this webforum is not a free, ad supported site, they're meta advertising. The forums serve to facilitate the growth of the PA brand. If you post on the forums you're considerably more likely to buy a PA shirt, or a PA hat, or a PA hoodie, or a PA book, or a PA videogame, or a PAX ticket, etc, etc. This is why every webcomic that wants to be self-sustaining sells merch and has a forum.
It seems like a few of you are not happy with ads based on the malware aspect alone. Have any websites come up with any ideas that keep revenue coming in, but have eliminated vulnerabilities?
I suppose the ads that do annoy me are ads before video streams (I watch a lot of tv shows from their network websites) that have nothing to do with the target audience. And then they repeat over and over again throughout the episode. So by the end of the episode I'm so much less likely to ever be interested in that product.
Read my fairy tale webcomic, The Fox & The Firebird, at: http://www.fairytaletwisted.com
This is admittedly less true of the kind of filtered, lower-budget advertising that you'd see on a site like PA than it is on, say, network TV. I think there's probably a change when the scale of your advertising changes from "get as many people as possible to know that this product exists" to "get people to choose this already well-known product over this alternative".
The consumer has not duty to view said ads, and simply ignoring the ads would be equivalent to filtering them.
Most ads are hideous, annoying and often filled with malware, and trying to guilt me into viewing them just puts the responsible party on my shitlist.
I don't disagree with the history, but it's a current battle and one that may be decided in favor of the copyright. Take a butcher's at this:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120515/03152918920/tv-network-execs-contemplate-going-to-court-to-say-skipping-commercials-is-illegal.shtml
As for ads, I was always find of those implanted text ads when they were done well. You know, back before blocking fucking everything. Because I got tired of my av/am beeping at me.
I also run Ad Block Plus. I tend to enable ads on sites I visit regularly, and mostly use it for blocking/hiding specific elements. Lot's of blogging software includes panels, like blog rolls, that are designed to keep you within the site and don't do much other than take up screen space.
I have never purchased anything through an ad, and I almost always only click on ads by accident, though there have been some exceptions to that mostly here because they do put some effort into making the ads reasonably relevant.
The DVR thing... when I watch TV in real time, and there is a commercial, I tend to go do something other than pay attention to it. Get a beverage, take poo, dick about on the interweb or read a bit of a book I'm working on.
When there are commercials on a DVR(that I rent from my cable co, not mythTV or whatever), I have to sit there paying a huge amount of attention to the ad. There's no audio, and it's only a few seconds, but I end up staring intently at a bunch of smiling faces and corporate logos. This means the ads are probably more effective when I'm fast forwarding through them on a dvr.
No. That's a ridiculous notion. But if I was flogging my IP to a cable carrier, I would probably not do business with a carrier that gave their customers such DVRs. Of course, cable carriers sell their own commercials, so there's not really any reason why this situation would ever occur.
This is exactly what's happening with Dish Networks in the US right now: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/19/dish_networks_at_odds_with_broadcasters_over_ad_skipping/
They provide DVRs with a feature called "Auto Hop" that skips over ads automatically. The broadcasters are ... displeased.
I kind of think this is really the crux of it.
People tend to follow the path of least resistance. It's easy to argue that if advertising was not so relentlessly annoying, people would likely not go to the bother required to block or otherwise avoid it. I don't tend to actively block ads, but when things irritate me it's the easiest thing in the world to right click->Block Content and know that I will never see that ad again.
Similarly, if Flash wasn't so ridiculously crashy I wouldn't have set my browser to only play flash content when clicked on (which is a change I only made recently, it is amazing how much advertising it removes from the average page).
It's somewhat like the accusation (now being borne out) levelled at the music industry that if they hadn't made music so expensive and difficult to purchase, they wouldn't have a piracy problem. By analogy, if advertisers had not pushed the boundaries of people's tolerance so far, they wouldn't be engaged in an arms race with people actively trying to avoid their content.
I could say that this wouldn't have been a problem if ad hosts didn't start embedding arbitrary chunks of Javascript or Flash into banner ads, and my last three malware infections came from Internet ad servers, or that the unaccountability in the Internet ad industry is so bad that the home page for the New York fucking Times was serving up malware for a whole day once. I could say all that, and it's all true, but to be honest that's not really the reason. I'd block the ads anyway, even in some hypothetical alternate reality where nobody is trying to hijack your computer.
If I'm going to a website, I'm going there for the content or the discussion on the site. I don't want to see the ads. They distract and draw attention away from the content, because that's the whole point; that's why they exist. And it's my fucking computer, and I'll decide what servers I'm going to contact, and what content is going to be displayed on the page. And, yeah, this is becoming incredibly common, to the point where the whole ad-supported model is starting to crumble; but frankly we saw that coming for a while.
Look, if the site wants to just charge me directly for content; that's fine. I'll pay it, or not and just go elsewhere. There's an online motorcycle magazine, Hell For Leather, that did this about a year ago -- the ad-supported thing is particularly shitty in a niche like motorcycling, and they decided to just junk the ads and charge two bucks per month to view the stories and post in the comments section. So I paid it. I knew it was going to come to this eventually since I first installed AdBlock for Firebird way back when. And I'm okay with this. It's honest. You need some money from the viewers, ask for some money. But no, when I go to your website I don't have an obligation to load all the content from whatever third party adserver that's embedded there.
This bit here. I mean, ok, so it is happening to some degree, but it's largely a contracting issue. Contract will expire, and a new one will be agreed to. Content providers will have the opportunity to ensure that their IP is distributed in a manner that is acceptable to them.
Hey, technology changes faster than contracts, but that's a relatively short term problem and certainly does not require new legislation.
There is kinda this thing, I believe, where cable/satellite companies kinda get to distribute stuff that is broadcast over the airwaves without an explicit contract. This... this is kinda bullshit if you ask me, but if you are going to use my spectrum, and prevent it from being used for data transmission(something I actually give a damn about), I don't really mind. I could see networks being pissed about their ads being stripped from such distributions which they have extremely limited control over, and I sort of think they have a valid point.
It would not take away my serious concerns re: malware, but if I could read an article online without being distracted by banner ads I would be a lot more pleased with such a website and less inclined to take the nuclear approach to all advertisement.
A lot of places have a "print this article" thing which pops up a new page with all the article content on one page and no ads.
I don't think interstitial ads have met with much success, to be honest. Certainly my first instinct on encountering them is generally to just close the tab unless there's a compelling reason (beyond casual interest) that I needed the content.