In a few years, after the dust has settled, we’re all going to look back at today’s web’s excesses and abuses as an almost unbelievable embarrassment. Hopefully, the worst is behind us. And it’s time to stop demonizing people who use tools to bring that sanity to their web browsers today.
Yes.
the article is ok, but forgets about something that although less important than privacy and other worse behaviours is the fact that on mobile devices on the road bloated, intrusive ads drain your battery and use up your limited bandwith
How do you / David intend to pay for the operations of OSNews in an ad-free world?
Where does the article state that we should strive ad-free world?
OSnews’ is dependent upon advertisers, yet advertising is getting shunned and it’s effectiveness is dropping. I’m sure none of this is lost on you, so like the OP, I’d be curious what you really have to say about the financial health of osnews?
I suspect osnews is mostly a hobby, so it doesn’t have major expenses or need to turn a profit. But at the same time I get the recurring feeling that if osnews had more revenue then it would reinvest that in updates and permanent staff to make the site better. Doesn’t this occur to you? (That’s rhetorical because I’m sure it does)
Advertising is a two sided beast: many of us don’t want it, but at the same time it’s the only business model that seems to pay.
Edited 2015-08-11 20:36 UTC
This statement doesn’t jive with your first paragraph. If the original statement is true “effectiveness, and thus revenue, is dropping”, then the second statement “it is the only business model that pays” is surely to become false–if not already so. Recent news suggests this business model is already less profitable than it was a year ago. If no changes occur and the trend continues, the only logical conclusion is that profitability will reach 0.
As for malware infested ads, I think the conclusion is obvious: more and more, the only entities willing to pay for ad services are those who are profiting from you in other, more naferious manners.
teco.sb,
I agree with you, that’s the conundrum.
Totally agree, i whitelist all good sites that provide relevant ads, osnews is one of those sites.
I actually like ads that are good and NOT have sound in them, both because it makes it possible to provide good content and sometimes it gives me opportunities i would not otherwise had known about. I particularly like political ads that higlight certain candidates positions like the ones osnews ran for the pirateparty candidate (back in 2005 i think).
“Adblock is disabled on this page”
Because I trust this site to not use abusive ads.
This is a very difficult subject, because this website does depend on ads, and the various forms of non-advertising related support you can do for websites, including regular membership drives, are generally too time-consuming to be practical.
The big problem is that over the years, advertisers have constantly pressured us to run more intrusive ads, and we’ve generally refused (aside from the occasional experiment). We depend primarily on Google ads, and even thought they’re not as visually intrusive, one of the reasons they pay well is because of the tracking. I’m looking at the site right now, and there’s a hilton ad encouraging me to get a hotel in a city where Hilton happens to know I’ll be traveling to soon. I can understand that many people find that kind of nifty cross-promotion unsettling and objectionable.
At this point, OSNews costs slightly more to run than it makes in revenue. If we can manage to increase the readership a bit more then we’ll be back in the black, but every reader that runs adblock makes that a little harder.
But it’s hard for me to judge, since I run adblock, though I run it off by default and only enable it for sites or for particular ad units on sites that offend me with intrusive ads.
Best case scenario would be that the advertising industry would voluntarily end the escalation of warfare on ad intrusion, and in response, readers would ease up on the adblock. But I think that’s a long shot.
Otherwise, I think we’ll need to come up with another kind of set it and forget it source of revenue for websites, or one of these days, I’ll get tired of covering our monthly shortfalls out of my pocket and I’ll throw in the towel. Either that, or I’ll need to hire someone who can experiment with creative but time-consuming revenue sources, and see if we can find something that works. If you’re interested in that job, send me an email.
David,
It’s really tough. I know there have been discussions over creative and innovative ideas for increasing user engagement on osnews over the years. But alas, I’m forced to concede that most of my ideas are revenue consuming, or revenue neutral, rather than revenue producing. I for one don’t know how to overcome the monetization obstacles any better than what you’ve been doing.
Osnews could host some online events/competitions (say once a year) aimed at increasing user involvement with contests and some fun technical challenges. The events could create buzz for osnews. Optimistically, with sponsorships, these events might generate revenue…
Edited 2015-08-12 02:10 UTC
What I think needs to happen (and should have happen) is a website has three different flavors:
1) Ads supported – The website is accessible if you allow yourself to be exposed to Ads and tracking. When you visit a website the first time you “opt-in” into allowing this, and the website is added to your “Ad supported” whitelist.
2) Fee supported – The website is accessible if you allow a micro-fee payment. For example something like Bitcoin, or some other cash-to-credit system. When you visit a website the first time you “opt-in” into the micro-payments for that website (added to your “Fee supported” whitelist). It could be charged on a per page viewed basis for example, where 1 page view is 1 credit. You would just refill your credits online by exchanging cash for web browsing credits.
3) Completely FREE – The website is accessible for free, and does not include any ads or tracking.
That is the way things should have been. You get to decide from the beginning if you want to pay using advertising/privacy, pay using currency, or use a free website for the content you want. In addition websites can have hybrid flavors, where you can specify a certain part of your website to be Ads, Fee, or Free. This is the fairest model I can think of. We might head to this model if everyone starts running things like AdBlock and Ghostery, or companies like Apple/Microsoft that don’t completely depend on Ad dollars put in their own Ad blocking. At least you would know what your giving up from the beginning, rather then these so called free services stealing from you. I guess they don’t call it stealing because they assume you automatically agree to their 1000 page usage/privacy agreements by just visiting their website.
I think you seem to forget that this experiment has already taken place. The early web was full of all 3 of those types of website: ad-supported, fee-supported and totally free (aka “it is fulfilling to me” model).
The problem is that only a few people people are willing to support the fee-supported model and so in order to keep it going you either price yourself out or go fee+ad-supported. People don’t like either very much; after all, if you are paying, you don’t want ads. Online newspapers, for example, have gone the latter direction. Some still have a subscription based revenue system, but most of us have found a way around that.
Frankly, I don’t know what the solution is. Only time will be able sort it out.
Until then, I’m going to continue using ad blocking software because ads are super annoying.
Your list’s No.1 assumes that ads and tracking are inseparable. They are Not.
Generic, non tracking ads, have been part of main stream paper based media (newspapers)for hundreds of years, maybe longer. Same for electronic broadcasting, from its inception, it had no other means of funding. Tracking wasn’t even possible.
Consider this in your formulation:
How many people are using ad/tracking blockers to retain/enforce their privacy choices? Losing the ads might just be a side benefit of this.
Lose the tracking, get rid of the over the top obnoxious and intrusive ads that make web surfing a drudgery and I’LL STOP BLOCKING for myself and for those I support. Until such time, the advertisers that force tracking on everyone and the sites that use them, can ESAD!
I’ve been wondering how practical this would be. On the osnews.com main page just now I had ads for Audible and Carphone Warehouse. On the comment screen, I have ads for Fisher Investments and Gmail for Work.
Is it reasonable to think a site-tailored ad, in the spirit of the printed ads you refer to, may be more acceptable? Instead of tracking my viewing habits to push an Audible ad because my wife recently bought an audiobook, place an ad related to computing. Assume that if I’m on osnews, I’m interested in computery things.
Yes, there are plenty of problems with the idea but I’m sure humans can come up with a better system than the one we have now.
Seeing as I don’t have a £250,000 portfolio, I can’t help but think Fisher Investment’s ad is wasted on me. I’m certainly not going to click to download their guide when it’s a Google Ad link comprising hundreds of alphanumeric characters.
I’ve always been quite partial to the idea of giving readers the option of “subscribing” to OSNews for a small monthly/yearly/whateverly fee, and technically we do offer this (it’s very well hidden though [1]), but I don’t think enough people are willing to pay up – even IF we were to make it prominently visible.
[1] http://www.osnews.com/subscribe
Well hidden indeed!
Coming here for 10 years and wasn’t consciously aware of this option.
Subcribed now
“I’ve been wondering how practical this would be.
Is it reasonable to think a site-tailored ad, in the spirit of the printed ads you refer to, may be more acceptable?”
It’s the only acceptable method from an ethical standpoint (this story’s title premise). The alternatives are blatant invasions of personal and aggregated privacy. Innovation in the realm, therefore, comes out of containing ones options within the ethical method only.
The logical sociopolitical ramifications of tracking everyone’s habits are dire, leaving the power to control individuals and whole communities/countries, in the hands of a very few of the wealthy and well placed. Knowledge is Power!
On “ethics”, as such, perhaps we should discuss them as pertains to the concept of Opt-Out (better described as–Never give a sucker an even break) for ads/tracking and agreeing/contracting something. A concept where the stupid and unwary are taken advantage of as the default to suit the wants and needs of corporate bottom lines and government’s controlling agendas.
Currently, within the ad/tracking realm there is no way to opt-in to being tracked, and the only way to opt-out of same is to use ad blockers and tracking blockers. Meanwhile the stupid and unwary get to have their privacy raped, be actively manipulated and have their online experiences turned into spinning, flashing, manic popup festivals.
Further, we can’t reasonably call-out individual’s ethics of actions in the second instance (blocking) without calling-out the ethics of the responsible parties of the first instance (forced tracking and Opt-Out instead of Opt-In).
Then addressing the concerns of all affected parties, including helping protect the computer neophytes.
The problem (as I see it) is with the tracking that goes on behind the scenes.
I am now very careful about my web presence bacause back in the early days I wasn’t and I had my identity stolen by a certain Mr Han in Hong Kong.
Having worked for a period at a company that does do a lot of its business via Web Adverts I saw at first hand this tracking and how your visits to one site can be linked to others and bingo, the flood gates are opened.
Some of the sites I visit are a bit ‘out there’. Not Porn but certainly not mainstream by any shape or form. As a result, I don’t want any tracking to be done.
That means sites like googleadservices, google-analytics etc, get disabled in my firewall.
I do know that this means that sites like OSNews don’t get revenue from my visits but for me, privacy is more important than that.
You can’t possibly think charging users per page view is even remotely sane. If you want to fail hard go ahead and try that model.
I know that websites need a way of funding to offer free content, but this way of injecting ads from third parties in my opinion is not working. I think it was last year or so that the ad company that phoronix was using was injecting ads that were blocking and also in my case injected some malwares. At Least it was what I figured through various extensions.
On the other hand using the way that some youtube channels are doing right now by injecting ad into the content itself is not going to work since there will be an ethical dilemma and can be abused.
All in all, I have no idea but I really want to help these independent entities like osnews, or many other websites and channels, and podcasts but I cannot take it when ads are making content usage for me a challenge. I have actually donated in many of these websites but I don’t think that would be consistent for the business either. I really like to see a solution becoming mainstream like what google brought into the online advertisement.
There’s another side of the argument that the original article does not even touch on:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/faked-flash-based-ads-on-hu…
As far as I’m concerned, both adblock and flash block are necessary security addons that get installed on any desktop machine I use, before I ever start browsing the web.
I believe we also should start petitioning browser makers to disable any features that allows any content to pop up/over any other content, as it is obvious by now that website devs can’t use these features in a responsible manner, without annoying the shit out of their visitors with ‘JOIN OUR COMMUNITY’ and other obnoxious popups.
Edited 2015-08-11 22:17 UTC
After the latest Firefox vulnerability I consider Adblock to be a necessary safety feature to browse the web.
In addition to the security of injected ads, there’s the bandwidth use. Some ads use lots & continuously. I used to also use NoScript.
I can’t imagine having to use Dial up with the bandwidth that ads use.
Hi,
Civilisation has reached a stage where it’s not just possible but likely for a person to be born, live a long life then pass away without ever having a single day where they are not subjected to someone else’s advertisements. The average person is exposed to around 250 adverts per day.
It should not be considered acceptable.
It is the direct result of companies attempting to pervert the principles of capitalism – trying to get consumers to buy a product, not because its the best product, but because of “marketing”. It allows good companies with good products (and bad marketing) to become unprofitable and be replaced by bad companies with bad products and (good marketing). It adds additional expense to every product and service consumers buy.
Advertising in all forms on all media needs to be banned.
What we need (as consumers, as a society and as an economy) is a site or service where we are able to obtain fair and unbiased information about available products (e.g. based on third-party scientific measurement – size, shape, weight, capacity, mean time between failures, power consumption, etc) so that consumers are able to make informed choices about the products they choose.
In addition; the Internet and the way it’s paid for needs to change. People should pay for received data and be reimbursed for sent data via. a system of “data credits”. This applies throughout. For example; if data goes from A to B to C to D then credits go from A to B to C to D; and sooner or later (e.g. monthly) each entity (person, company) either pays the difference in credits they owe or are paid for the difference in credits they’re entitled to. In this way consumers (e.g. us readers) would pay for Internet access, and producers (e.g. OSNews) would be paid for supplying content people want.
– Brendan
Edited 2015-08-12 00:59 UTC
Brendan,
The concept seems novel and is very interesting to me. There is undoubtedly a lack of micro-payment options. However I don’t think this would work well in practice because not all up/down bits have an equivalent monetary value and there’s no way to automatically determine their value. In the extreme some bits even have negative value (ie spam). The last thing we’d want to do is to pay the spammers for the bits they’re sending.
Hi,
The cost of bandwidth remains the same regardless of type of data; except for packets using some sort of QoS mechanism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service ) which could use different rates.
Of course you’re right about spam; but banning advertising in all its forms (including having fines for people caught advertising and providing a way for people to report advertising) would mostly wipe out 99.9% of all spam.
It would also involve a few other changes for some specific cases. For example, someone providing an online backup service would have to charge a fee (to recover the cost of users uploading backups). For these sorts of changes it’d just be different (not really good or bad).
– Brendan
Brendan,
But we already do ban spam, I used to report it diligently to the FTC but I gave up because it became overwhelming and ineffective. My spamtraps are receiving 10k unsolicited emails so far this year. A lot of it exactly what you’d expect: fraud, but some of it is from brand names companies who seem to have gotten mixed up with scummy marketing agencies who probably sold them leads (shame on you CVS!).
Even when there’s strict financial penalties involved, like the FTC fining solicitors for calling do-not-call numbers, that hasn’t phased the criminals who continue to call my phone every damn day. Many of us have to pay for receiving these calls that we never asked for and explicitly refuse via the do-not-call list.
I believe things would only get worse if there were an incentive to send more bits, which would become a goal in and of itself.
Hi,
You’ve completely missed the point.
Advertising is currently a socially accepted practice; and everyone is constantly bombarded by advertising all day every day on every form of media (from billboards in the street, adverts in newspapers/magazines, adverts on TV and radio, etc). In this environment “email” is just another medium for “socially accepted everywhere” advertising and attempting to ban advertising on some mediums and not others is hypocrisy (and hardly surprising that law enforcement couldn’t care less about “slightly less socially accepted” practices).
By changing to “not socially accepted on any medium” you’re not going to get (e.g.) companies mixed up with scummy marketing agencies. Legitimate marketing agencies (scummy or not) cease to exist.
Yes there will always be some that break laws (in the same way that people still get murdered) but it will be far less common (in the same way that everyone doesn’t get murdered daily); and far easier to enforce than most laws as there’s a significant clue (which company’s products were advertised) and a trail to follow (where the advertisement appeared), especially when the sheer volume is reduced to something law enforcement can actually manage.
– Brendan
Brendan,
I applaud you for coming up with new micropayment ideas, really I do. And although I remain skeptical, I’d stand behind you in addressing the social norms that have produced the gross excesses of advertising.
However our disagreement is with bit transfer credits. Where’s the accounting? Who determines which bits are worth paying for? You say they’re all the same, but obviously we’ve already discussed exceptions for spam. There are others: you should not paying for a DOS attack against you, so there has to be exceptions and logging/oversight/appeal process for these exceptions. Even though you argue that laws will fix this, the moment you create an economy based on bits, you’d get a wide range of unintended consequences. People would game the system to generate more credits: disabling gzip, padding HTML, disabling caching, etc. Text publications would die out in favor of videos that earn a lot more credits (since you are proposing that all bits be the same value). I’m sure this was not what you intended.
So I still think you are onto something with the micropayments, but it should not correlate to bits. I think just having a simple (obviously secure) HTTP standard for tipping a few cents would help break down the resistance to paying authors. Just have a simple coin icon in the browser and let people click on it trivially when they like something.
Credit cards suck, they don’t work as micropayments. Entering a CC number/billing address/etc is cumbersome, the high transaction overhead discourages small tips, the need to trust your credit details to the website you want to tip is dumb. A universal micropayment standard could solve this.
Edited 2015-08-13 20:23 UTC
As far as I know I have never, and would never, ever, consciously clicked on an ad. If I do click an ad by mistake then as I understand it that costs real money for someone, so in that view I do think that blocking ads is in a way fair as it avoids causing expenses to those who pays for ‘real’ clicks.
On the other hand randomly clicking on ads by mistake every now and then would obviously contribute to the survival of the sites that I do like to visit, but I don’t see that as morally better in any way. I’m still a financial burden to someone either way.
So should I start to look at internet ads and actively use them as a way to get information of things I need to buy? No way, that’s probably already happening unconsciously way more than I like already. The only sane option is to filter them out as much as possible, either by using technical means or just mentally ignoring them.
(I had adblock disabled on osnews for a while but then I got tired of seeing the same ad over and over again for a thing I just bought and that you only ever need one of, and which usually is used for at least 10 years. Even without the privacy problem I would prefer random ads to the usually idiotic targeted ads, random stuff is much more interesting)
Edited 2015-08-12 07:34 UTC
I think if the ads were just animated gifs/jpegs/pngs with just a simple javascript to count views and clicks, adding a few percent extra bytes, cycles, few would have a problem.
Instead many want to run flash, have auto-play audio, burn CPU with javascript from people who don’t know code, and probe and set dozens of things to track.
One reason is that glitz is cheaper to develop than relevance (even for Google). Some in you face ad will be seen, but you would have to notice that new device that is 4x better than the one you were planning to buy and would click immediately.
(I hope they don’t start publishing gift wishlists – click here to send gift X to Y).
Further, Google has banned antiwar.com because they had some fragments (didn’t actually run Ads) on the Abu Gharib article with photos. Kafka.py apparently nuked them. I might actually want to support sites by NOT blocking ads, but when they are being evil and stupid about it, I want to retaliate by blocking everything.
I would really like to have ads for things I would consider relevant, and had not thought of myself. Unfortunately, it shows what I last searched for (and rejected, at least at the price and provides no coupon or other discount), or something already in my shopping cart (which I plan on buying in a few days anyway), or something utterly irrelevant.
Google might be best, but would get a failing (D on A-F) grade. Part of the problem is their creepy tendency to be helpful – transgender people get their identities exposed to their coworkers before they have come out, birthdays and other significant times for anyone anywhere on your contact list – which is added to from anyone who has ever contacted you in any way – are added to your calendar. So there is an incentive to disconnect, disable, and go dark. None of this is opt-in, and opt-out tends to be both difficult and a choice to be data-raped or have it disabled entirely.
Note Microsoft Windows 10 has followed the “Be as evil and creepy as Google” model.
Maybe I could spend 5-15 minutes in an ad-search-assistant at the beginning of the day and get a “day pass”. You’ve looked for things which do X, here are some suggestions… But I can also search for shopping. I really, really want to find things which would be useful and save me time. See kk.org cool tools. Instead I (block instead of) get a flash animation for a product which given my livestyle, etc. isn’t relevant or useful.
In a few years, after the dust has settled, we’re all going to look back at today’s web’s excesses and abuses as ineffective and unproductive.
That’s because in a few years the ads will all be built into the hardware and operating systems.