The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
We now return to our regularly scheduled PA Forums. Please let me (Hahnsoo1) know if something isn't working. The Holiday Forum will remain up until January 10, 2025.
Posts
On Ars I see a tasteful ad for an IBM server that animates briefly. Good content + good ads is fine.
The point is people are willing to pay for what Ars offers to keep the content spice flowing. I'd pay for any of them if they didn't provide the content for free.
How would I prove what? That if every single ad impression was actually hidden from view, advertisers would stop paying for impressions?
If ads no longer generate any click through nor did anything to affect purchasing habits, would businesses continue to purchase them? Ad buyers believe the products they purchase have value, most likely due to some measurable results they see rather than pure ideology.
Also if we are now talking about just hiding ads, what does that do for the defense of "I don't want people running dangerous, privacy invading, scripts on my machine"?
That's not the point. I was framing ad-hiding in the sense of the Kantian categorical imperative: basically, if you extrapolate this behavior out to everyone in the system, what is the result? You can't say, "well, my behavior is ethical because most people won't do what I'm doing so my impact will be minimal," that's just a cop-out.
Now, I don't have a problem with ad-blocking, but I'm ready to start paying subscription fees for the sites I like when the internet advertising model collapses (and it's already fraying at the edges).
I wonder what real affect internet advertising really has, to be honest. Outside of edge cases like PA where they heavily control what's thrown out there. I have seen things that say tv ads affect things like car sales, but I don't know the ins and outs of the advertisement industry. I'd think billboards generate the most revenue of them all, to be honest.
Again you're assuming everyone is using adblocking. This will never be the case unless a web browser comes out at the gate with one. And by "a web browser" I mean, internet explorer.
We are giving far too much credit to people's technical know hows. Most of the people that click ads are the same ones that have a hard time figuring out why their cup holder keeps breaking when they turn on their computer in the morning.
I haven't bought one recently, but I do love all of the shirts I've bought from PA over the years, and as much as I love the comic and enjoy reading the news posts, watching bits from PAX, and listening to/watching most of the D&D podcasts, the forums and the sense of community they garner also ties to my love of the site and the franchise, which in turn has led to me owning both games (and looking forward to the third), and hoping to go to PAX one day (probably East), and maybe even the charity dinner, though that'd be a bit of a stretch.
Obviously it is a lot of work and a sizable amount of money to keep the forums up, a free service which I use and enjoy and appreciate immensely, but I don't think it's fair to say that they're necessarily entirely a black hole into which that time and money is poured.
So while the forums might not necessarily be advertising in the traditional sense, I feel that the community that has grown over the years is sizable enough to be worthy of recognition. Word of mouth advertising, in effect, at the very least.
Edit: also, I agree; the initial direction of the thread is crazy. No, ad blocking is not theft.
Not everyone's business model involves directly charging people for the content. For example, the website you're posting on.
I will comment on the newspaper/ads/commercials.
1) I have made it clear about commercials. This I will not repeat, since the information is available to you in posts above.
2) There seems to be a lot of "well what about this, and what about that." - The topic is in reference to "ADBLOCK. A THIRD PARTY TOOL - DESIGNED WITH THE SOLE PURPOSE OF CIRCUMVENTING A SYSTEM WITHOUT THE SYSTEM OWNERS CONSENT." - I can not stress enough how simple this makes the topic, and that asking about Newspapers and billboards and things of that nature, simply do NOT apply. They are different forms of advertisement that have pre-paid contracts based on assumed statistics agreed to by 2 or more respected groups.
Please don't take the capital letters as a sign of yelling or frustration, I simply need to embolden the concept at hand. Many people steer from the topic and I am not interested in anything outside of this topic, inside of this thread.
I agree that the metaphors used so far are unhelpful, and this bold part here is, I think, where the confusion has set in. Let's clarify something here.
I am the system owner.
I can put that in all-caps boldface if you like. This is what it comes down to: I, the AdBlock-using web site reader, am the owner of the system that is my computer. I do not require, nor do I care to seek out, the website owner's "consent" to display his website on my own computer as I see fit. The website owner does not become entitled to dictate those terms to me. If my computer sends a valid HTTP GET request and the server sends back a web page, that is the extent of my relationship with the server and the people owning it.
So, without going outside the realm of the topic - "Is Ad Filtering Theft?" - My answer remains Yes. Nothing more, nothing less.
Caveat: If you're (anyone reading this) upset that you think I called you a 'thief' or feel the need to defend yourself, please take it up with someone else.
Anyone disagreeing with this very clear statement by Daedalus has already lost the argument and not realized it yet. They are wrong. They are not participating actively in the on-going discussion.
The argument we were having as a follow-on to this statement was this:
If the website hosts find that we use our systems to display some of their content but not the rest (the ads), will they feel driven to change the way their site works, offering us content that feels less valuable, or more burdened with newer, onerous monetization.
I guess if you consider website viewing analogous to TV viewing it could be argued. But these are the same people who want to charge you licenses to link to their content.
I never said "your content is bad if you put ads on it."
It figures a dirty equalist would misread that.
You seem to be trying to split an increasingly semantic hair. If the bolded makes adblock objectionable, it must also make (for example) tivo objectionable. Both circumvent systems designed to make money for the content provider.
So, you are drawing a distinction between ad buys which paid on the basis of time, rather than on the basis of actual, tracked exposures. But this is a meaningless distinction.
1) Companies which advertise on television actually do track exposures, with a reasonably high degree of accuracy. Content providers track them too, because they need that data in negotiation. The viability of television advertising is, natch, based on how many people are expected to see it.
2) The same is true of online advertising! We have the ability to track online exposures with a higher degree of precision, but that doesn't make timeliness irrelevant. 1000 exposures a day are more valuable than 1000 over the course of a week.
If we ignore timeliness, as you are ultimately doing when you draw the distinction between a buy of a set duration and a buy of a set number of exposures, then we should conclude that adblock doesn't matter as long as some people aren't using it; the advertiser will still see the same number of exposures, it'll just take longer.
ed: also, if we aren't talking about this in terms of the consumer's moral obligation (vis not committing "theft"), then what the fuck are we talking about? If I don't have an obligation not to block advertising then I'll just keep on doing it and trust companies to figure out new ways to make money off me.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
As for bandwidth, I've seen the front page of some news sites shrink by almost one full megabyte once I blocked all the useless ad images and javascript poop.
I mean, I can understand why some people like to use the word theft, just as I understand why PETA likes to use the word "murder" if someone puts out a mousetrap. That doesn't make their usage justified.
That implies that the people that don't use adblock are bearing a financial burden for those that do, which isn't the case. There isn't a class of consumers that "pays" for ad-supported content.
Just as copyright infringement(or piracy, as an attempt to use another unrelated crime to create a certain mental image), ad-filtering as well fails to qualify as theft as properly defined. Just as ElJeffe said, it's about as equally valid as PETA using "murder", in that it is used to manipulate the audience of whatever proclamation/bit of news/etc. it might be included in. These things have proper names for a reason, and using a more grievous crime to describe them is an attempt to manipulate the public perception on the issue, and immediately labels the responsible party as dishonest.
As for ad-filtering, Daedalus put it correctly and very concisely. Besides, if the content is provided, and I have not signed an agreement to view ads in exchange for the content, I am under no obligation to do it. The content has already been sent to my system, of which I am the administrator and the owner, and the content provider has ZERO right to dictate how the content will be treated on my system to arrange for its viewing, barring the breaking of ACTUAL law.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
"Free riding" is the accepted term, I believe.
Most business that offer a free service seem to rely either on universal advertisements, or on whales. Unfortunately, the whale model only works if the business actually has a reasonably expensive product to sell, which many websites might not have. Penny Arcade can sell shirts to people, but what about a more generic blog?
Such an analysis would also compell us to click and purchase things from website ads as if no one did so advertisers would stop paying for website ad space. The Categorical Imperative is an awfully large gun to employ in this fight - it's going to demand a lot of things if we accept that web advertisements and the ppi and it's continuance are a good thing.
However, HallowedFaith was not arguing from a Kantian perspective anyway, not that it really matters, I'm happy to have the discussion.
Well it doesn't have to be a financial burden per se. The burden can be any effort that those who bear it have to face. In the case of this it's just a bit more data, but you can conceivably scale it up.
"freeriders" is a better term though.
Daedalus said it though. This is just another example of a failure in getting what this "internet" is. Using words like "theft" to describe what happens is bizarre. It's ones and zeros in this here computer and I can tell this computer to arrange all them in whatever way I like.
Well there's no actual reason to think you called anyone a thief when you clearly did call people thieves. Acting like people are somehow wrong in engaging you upon you calling them such is just plain silly. If I call anyone who posts on this forum a murderer for posting here I damn well know that people would call me out for that. This is just dickery.
(Unless you're saying that calling ad filtering theft does not mean anyone who does so is a thief, which would just be silly.)
I am not 100% convinced by the Categorical Imperative myself, either, but that's enough material to make a whole 'nother thread. Regardless, I maintain that the idea of "well we're loading them but hiding them from the page so it's totally different" is intellectually dishonest, as is the stance of "well 50+% of viewers won't ever install AdBlock". If you're blocking ads, own it.
because the audience isn't the customer here. they are the product
What if they just have a required free log on, which registering for requires, in plain obvious text, agreement to not use ad blocking software?