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News Google announces ad-blocker payment platform

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Gareth Halfacree, 5 Jun 2017.

  1. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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  2. Mr_Mistoffelees

    Mr_Mistoffelees The Bit-Tech Cat. New Improved Version.

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    Put sites behind such a paywall and people who are sick of intrusive and slow to load ads will simply go elsewhere. Nobody wants to be sat waiting, looking at a blank page, while an adserver fails to respond and nobody wants big flashing images and autorunning videos that can't be stopped. If they make the ads less intrusive and the adservers faster to respond and deliver their ads, then they might get somewhere.
     
  3. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Except this is an alternative to a paywall. You can either whitelist the site, or you can pay Cash Monies. Don't want to whitelist the site or pay Cash Monies? Then you going elsewhere is a net win for the site: if you're not paying Cash Monies nor generating Lovely Advertising Revenue, then you're sucking up resources and contributing nothing back. You leave, that means more resources for those who are contributing either Cash Monies or Lovely Advertising Revenue to the site.
    But when you're running an ad-blocker, how do you know whether the ads have improved or not? Let's say Site A runs an obnoxious ad, and a bunch of visitors switch ad-blockers on to block all the advertising rather than just the one obnoxious ad. Site A gets rid of the obnoxious ad and switches to nice, subtle adverts. The result: the adverts are less effective at capturing the attention of those who don't run ad-blockers, and the people who do run ad-blockers never noticed the switch and still run ad-blockers.

    Is that likely to convince the ad department to keep the nice, subtle adverts or switch back to Punch The Monkey and Win Seattle?
     
  4. Mr_Mistoffelees

    Mr_Mistoffelees The Bit-Tech Cat. New Improved Version.

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    All fair points but, doesn't change the fact that intrusive and slow to load ads have greatly irritated a lot of people and, I suspect, many of those people are not going to pay up or put up with the ads. Adblocking or going elsewhere might not make any difference but, it won't stop people doing it.
     
  5. Vault-Tec

    Vault-Tec Green Plastic Watering Can

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    There are a few websites I've visited lately that refuse to work unless you disable your ad block. I just go elsewhere.
     
  6. bawjaws

    bawjaws Multimodder

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    If ads weren't quite so annoying then I'd happily whitelist sites that are currently guilty of hosting ads to the detriment of my browsing experience. I run an adblocker at home but can't at work: browsing the same sites both at home and at work gives very different experiences, and one is much less pleasant than the other.

    For example, those annoying ads that load a banner at the top of the screen that forces the rest of the page down... as the ads are the last thing to load, it's extremely common for me to click on the link I want to visit, only to end up elsewhere as the page drops down to accommodate a banner ad.
    That's before getting into those large autoplaying videos, with sound, which are the devil's work.

    Basically, if your site runs egregiously irritating adverts, expect to be blacklisted. And once you've been blacklisted, don't expect me to check in on you every so often to see if you've mended your ways. I think that if sites start asking me to either switch off my adblocker or pay cash money to continue using it, I'll go elsewhere if at all possible.
     
  7. Ravenfeeder

    Ravenfeeder What's a Dremel?

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    I'd be mostly OK with ads if there banned all animation or video. Anything moving on the screen at all makes things very unpleasant to read, so I don't bother and go elsewhere. No videos, no animated gifs no text changing colour, no pop-ups. If your site obeys those rules I'll turn off the ad-blockers.

    I've yet to turn off the ad-blocker.
     
  8. wiggles

    wiggles Minimodder

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    The internet is dieing.
     
  9. Wwhat

    Wwhat Minimodder

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    Rolling
    On the floor
    Laughing

    If they think anybody but some confused Americans are going to step into that nonsense.

    And of course it's a tracking nightmare, to enable them to know you paid (which gives your identity in the first place) your browser has to send a unique ID (connected to your payment details) to each and every site.
    So to agree to this scheme you first have to be a person who abhors any kind of privacy.

    That's the issue in general with DRM incidentally, people think it's just for paying or blocking and think that if they are on a site with video that isn't blocked or commercial it plays no role, but in fact many sites, especially news sites, have video that asks for the unique identifier for DRM and it's used to track people, but the people don't know, but meanwhile the companies and governments of the Five Eyes etc. know what news items you watch for instance, and you might ask yourself why they need to know.
     
    Last edited: 10 Jun 2017

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