For a brief period of time I turned off my adblocker and temporarily reverted my hosts file to the default to see what was going on. It is 2013 and internet advertising still ruins the browsing experience. Very quickly I've put everything back in place. I don't even care about how I am not supporting website owners. This isn't worth it.
What isn't worth what, exactly? The content isn't worth the ads? Then don't read it. Deciding that it "isn't worth" supporting web site owners is a fantastically selfish way to look at things. If I find a site with obnoxious advertising I close the tab and go elsewhere. It's not like there aren't other sources of iPhone 5S release news.
Allowing websites to pull in revenue with advertisements isn't worth it if I get dragged through optimized layouts for better ad-CTR, links which look like generic website content but are ads, all sorts of pop-ups with hard-to-find close buttons (this bold red cross which looks like it will close another Javascript pop-up? Here comes browser tab #43, maybe this advertisement interests you!) and other nasty tricks. It might be selfish but it is part of the freedom I have.
The part you didn't address: if those things are such a pain for you (and I have no idea what sites you're reading regularly because I get a popup like that very, very rarely) then close the tab and don't read the site.
Why would I do this if I have the option to read the site without the annoying parts? You are implying I owe website owners my screen estate to display the ads they run which simply is not the case.
There's a store down the road that has really bad security. I could take a bottle of Sprite from their fridge and walk out with it. Should I?
Before this descends into a "this isn't stealing" circular debate, my point is that just because you can get something for free that you would normally have to pay for (be it in money or screen real estate) doesn't mean you should.
I am not implying that you owe them your screen real estate, I am outright stating it.
All a website is doing is giving me a bunch of bits for free. I can do (mostly) anything I want with those bits. I can leave them how they are, or I can modify them so that the presentation is more appealing to me. The owners of these websites understand that they cannot do anything to prevent me from modifying the way the bits are presented to me. There was no agreement between me and them that I won't modify the bits: they just send me the bits when I ask for them.
A better analogy would be a pizza company that gives out free pizzas, no questions asked. However, they get money every time a customer eats an olive on the pizza. When they give me the pizza, they know very well that I can just pick off the olives (I hate olives). So I am well within my right to pick off olives. The problem is their business model, not me picking off the olives.
It has nothing to do with security or stealing, you are really making comparisons up now just to prove your point. You are actually stealing from a store because in a normal situation it is obligatory to pay. You are taking something away the store owner normally should get paid for.
Now, imagine this store would offer the Sprite free-to-fetch BUT there is a man singing next to the fridge which sells CDs of his recordings. It is not obligatory to buy a CD before you fetch a Sprite. However, the man ocassionally jumps in front of the fridge and tries to make eye-contact to give you his best shot at convincing you to buy a CD of his. Annoying, isn't it?
This man adds no value to the Sprite you can get for free yet he tries to sell you a CD you didn't ask for! Well, apparently the store owner made a deal with the man: for every CD he sells, he gets a nice commission. Would you steal the Sprite if you put on sunglasses (to avoid eye-contact) and wore earbuds (so his singing doesn't bother you) every time you get a free Sprite from the fridge?
If you know the answer, you know whether ad blocking is stealing. Now, if the set-up would be "Buy a CD and get a Sprite" (a pay wall) you would indeed be stealing if you got the sprite without paying.
These companies can't enforce that their ads are shown at the other end, so they make a business decision regarding revenue fully knowing that some people use technology to block the ads.
If you were a open source user you would not visit the web sites at all.
This is the flip side of the open source credo. So if you consider the "You have two choices, user our free software and let everyone who you give it to also use it and modify it, or don't use it."
Web sites aren't there yet, but they will get there which will be you can view our site with ads or you can not view our site, your choice.
In both the FOSS case and the web site case, the organization is trying to leverage their 'value' (working code, information content) into a desired 'behavior' (giving away code, seeing ads). As more an more web sites shut down and the choices narrow, the value of good content goes up. And at some point they will be confident enough to disable your access to it in response to disabling ads. (Ars Technica did some interesting experiments in this space).
As the web matures, and moves past the 'browser experience' I expect you will see more and more of that.
It's still surprisingly broken (as a whole) despite everything else on the web moving forward leaps and bounds -- Wish I had an answer, as it's a bazillion dollar industry just waiting for a cleaner solution
Ad blockers are tools for theft. Do you avoid all websites that rely on advertising for all or part of their income or are you perfectly fine stealing their work/services by denying them the opportunity to make a little money during your visit?
Alternatively, do you only use services for which you pay a fee?
Which search engine do you use?
Email?
Social sites?
Just trying to understand this position. Unless someone explicitly gives a product or service away (HN being a good example) the correct moral and ethical position is to not tamper with their revenue generation strategy or otherwise not use their product or service. Anything else is theft.
Being annoyed does not entitle you or anyone else to steal. It doesn't magically make it OK.
If you want to make the case that using ad blockers is akin to theft, you have to explain what the advertiser is deprived of when a person chooses not to view their ad. Sure, the advertiser is paying a website to put an ad on their page, but just because they paid to put it there doesn't entitle the advertiser to a certain amount of your attention. It may or may not be profitable to put it there, but the advertiser has no moral claim on anybody's time or attention as a result of their business model.
The only reason this argument ever came about is because it's easy to measure who sees an ad on the internet, which is not the case for billboards, TV commercials, newspaper ads, and so on. Since the measurement was cheap and intuitively it made sense for advertisers to charge based on the number of people that see or click on an ad, they chose to pay website owners based on the fine grained statistics of the webpage rather than by assessing a priori the market value of an ad on a particular webpage for a particular length of time.
The "theft" here is imaginary and entirely self-imposed by the business model of the advertiser. Especially when you consider that the demographic that uses adblockers probably wouldn't click on very many ads if they didn't use the adblockers. And whatever impression the mere presence of an advertisement would create might very well be a negative one to this demographic.
The conceptual leap from "our business model requires ads to make money" and "some people don't want to view these ads" to "those people are stealing from us" is a syllogistic fallacy.
It's really funny to watch people who don't want to pay for anything run around in circles trying to justify their actions. The only morally and ethically correct behavior is NOT to visit sites with advertising. It isn't to use the sites and block their ads. It's as simple as that.
Don't want ads? Don't use the service. Go pay for a service that will use your money to build a site without the ads that bug you so much.
> "Don't want ads? Don't use the service. Go pay for a service that will use your money to build a site without the ads that bug you so much."
Where possible, I do exactly that. For example, I have a Netflix subscription, but don't watch regular TV.
The reality is that many services are simply not offered in an ad-free model. Most people are ok with ad-supported services in exchange for not paying for them, so the business case for creating an ad-free version for the minority that isn't ok with ads doesn't always exist. But those who don't want to have their browsing experience polluted by distracting and space wasting ads for irrelevant products aren't suddenly going to change their minds because they're in the minority.
Personally, I would be willing to pay a small monthly fee for an ad blocker (I did make a donation once) and have a portion of that distributed to website owners whose ads were blocked. It's probably not a very realistic scenario, but the bottom line is that an ad blocker is something that many people find useful and which some would be willing to pay for if there weren't ample free alternatives. The adblocker provides a service to me 100% of the time I visit a website with ads, whereas an ad is only useful to me if I find it relevant and choose to act on it (0.000001% of the time).
Stealing? Really? The content is free to consume by anyone, or it goes behind a pay wall in which case the user decides whether it is worth paying for. Advertisements ruin layouts, can often not be trusted and scream for your attention. I have the right to set up restrictions on which hosts my network adapter can connect to and I don't feel like wasting bandwidth on stuff I didn't ask for in the first place or does everything it takes to track my behaviour. I do use services for which I pay granted they are worth my money.
Utter nonsense. Opinions like these only come from people who don't understand business, have never run one and never risked their own capital, effort and health launching one.
Nonsense.
It's just like reading a physical newspaper without paying for it and, at the same time, having some kind of a machine that blacks out all of the advertising. Stealing. Plain and simple.
Businesses cost money to run. Advertising is an age-old method to make money. And for some businesses that's the best way to support their operations.
Look at Google [0]. It costs TEN BILLION DOLLARS TO RUN GOOGLE FOR JUST THREE MONTHS. TEN FUCKING BILLION. And you would use Google with an ad blocker? How dare you!
Take it to an extreme: Starting tomorrow everyone in the world uses ad blockers. The internet would collapse overnight.
Either pay for the service or allow the ads. Yes sir! You are stealing.
> "Take it to an extreme: Starting tomorrow everyone in the world uses ad blockers. The internet would collapse overnight."
The internet predates internet advertising. Many sites use different business models and are profitable without relying on ads. If everyone in the world used ad blockers, many websites would die, but if these websites actually provided a useful service, replacements would spring up using alternate business models because the internet is about as close to a free market as currently exists.
Well, it is obvious that you guys will use any imaginable excuse to justify stealing services on the internet. You can create whatever mental construct you wish to create, the bottom line is that you are not paying for a service AND you are taking steps to deny the service provider from even having the potential to earn something by providing you with that service. It's pure hypocrisy. Plain and simple.
There are people who will justify just about anything, including gassing innocent children. That's the nature of the world we live in. I am not equating the two at all. Simply stating that human beings are pretty good about justifying bad things they choose to do.
As I have stated repeatedly, if you told me that you did not use any of these services that derive revenue from advertising I'd definitely hold you up as an example of taking the correct moral and ethical road. Saying that ads are annoying, look ugly or have potential security problems (bullshit) AND on top of it, still going to those sites to use their work product for free. Well, you are a thief.
Then don't use the websites that offend you by daring to offer a free service by using advertising to pay their salaries and overhead.
Do you get paid for the work you do? Do you think others ought to get paid for their work? Well, if you don't like advertising don't steal their work product by using their sites through ad blockers.
It really is a simple concept. All arguments to the contrary sound like a five year old kid crying "I don't care! I want it! I want it! I want it!".
Every company has it's moments, but why does Samsung so often come off as particularly petty. Whether it's completely knocking off designs or launching half-baked products, or buying all the ad space on the day of an apposing company's product launch. The rules of capitalism allow all of this behavior, but generally mankind frowns upon it when this behavior is exhibited by a person. Why is it not frowned upon when it is exhibited by a group of people operating as one; as a corporation?
Well, your opinion is your own, but there's nothing wrong with this. Apple could have just as easily bought the space. Here in San Francisco, Samsung bought all the ad space in all the BART (subway) stations for weeks leading up to and after the release of the iPhone 5 to tout the S3. It's just marketing strategy and it's a pretty good one, especially if millions (billions?) of dollars are riding on the fact that people recognize your product instead of a competing one.
Granted, while effective, Samsung's strategy is rather predictable and easily (albeit expensively) countered by buying the ad space yourself. Why Apple didn't do this, I don't know. It would have been the first thing I would have done as the VP of Marketing at Apple once I knew the launch date.
Apple spends almost nothing compared to Samsung's giant advertising dollars anyways. They don't need to, really - Apple's solid reputation lets the media do their ads for them.
Just like how Apple doesn't need to buy billboards at the mall when they have bright, inviting stores of their product to entice you.
Also, why wait until you've announced a major media event before buying advertising to coincide with said media event?
In other words, if Samsung is buying advertising to crowd out competitors' ads on the day of an Apple product launch, Apple is surely not the competitor they're hoping to crowd out.
Bad for the planet too, and all just to save a couple of weeks on a boat. Buying up ad space seems pretty minor by comparison. I guess minor does go along with "petty". Funny how we're sometimes much more upset about a small slight than a large one.
Those aren't just a couple of weeks on a boat. Those are probably some of the most valuable weeks in the global economy today. The faster you can move product the better, especially when you're Apple and you're trying to maximize how many you sell right after a launch.
If you're trying to draw a comparison, maybe a better way to compare would be to say that Apple buys up empty carriers just to keep Samsung from moving their stuff?
Inventory sitting around on a boat for a couple of weeks costs you a lot of money. We're not talking about sewing machines or anvils here, we're talking about a high-margin item that weighs very little and is extremely "perishable". Air-freight is perfect for this.
Well, they only do it once a year. I have to wonder just how much it would really cost to move production up a couple of weeks, or move the release down a couple of weeks. Most of the time they're fine waiting for inventory to come over the slow way.
The cost of shipping a phone by plane is insignificant because they're booking so much capacity. This isn't like FedExing one phone from your house to a friend. This is a whole other scale. They probably only pay a couple of bucks and they save way more than that by not having to stockpile these phones anywhere, with heavy security to keep them from "leaking", for weeks on end.
Apple turns over their inventory almost as fast as McDonald's. Think about that.
It comes off as petty because you don't like them. It doesn't come off as petty to me - I simply don't think about Samsung, so I don't brood about it either. I can't see any analogy between Samsung and individuals. Whether something is a knockoff or half-baked seems to be your judgment.
If a person did this, it would be the kind of thing they would answer for the "successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage" question on the YC application.
Since when is "pay a bunch of money" any sort of "hack"? Granted the term "hack" is being watered down, but has it slipped this far? Did I "hack" myself a cup of coffee today? Nope, I paid for it.
The "paying money" is just the means of the "hack", not the "hack" itself. The hack is recognizing that there is a great, targeted opportunity to keep your product in customers' minds on one of the biggest marketing days for your biggest competitor. If anything, Samsung saved money by using it efficiently.
I've always said, somebody needs to tell Samsung that they're a market leader. They act like a cheap Chinese knock-off company in spite of their strong position and brand.
Apple is plenty petty, too. Remember when they blocked Google Voice because it "replicated existing functionality"?
Why is it not frowned upon when it is exhibited by a group of people operating as one; as a corporation?
Because who cares, aside from Apple fans? When an individual is petty, the target of that pettiness is a person. When a company is petty, the target of that pettiness is another company. Why become personally attached to that? It isn't your profit at stake.
Besides, if we judged companies that way what would Walmart be? A sociopathic killer, or something...
It comes off as petty because they buy up the ad space specifically to try to get in someone else's way. They didn't buy it specifically because they have a product launch. They didn't buy it just on a random day. They bought it to try to hamstring a competitor. To me, that's negative competition rather than positive (trying to drag someone else down rather than to elevate yourself). That's petty.
There is no way this can be called 'negative competition'. This could be considered grey if you count every single interaction between competitors as such. If this is petty than Mac-Windows ads must be categorized disgustingly so.
Do you think it's petty when a grocery store puts their own bottle of blue stuff next to the Windex?
Is making their own blue stuff petty, or is it when they display it next to the brand name blue stuff that it becomes petty?
Good for Samsung, good for smartphone buyers, and even if it's not good for Apple's bottom line this year, this sort of competition should be healthy. If they can't compete with the knock-offs, it's time to stop buying Apple products.
I'm not sure this will be particularly successful. Looks like well over half of the content on the CNet homepage is iPhone related. That's the kinda of advertising only Apple seems to get, much better and a lot cheaper. The amount Samsung has to spend to overcome the "organic" Apple advantage must be rather large.
> The amount Samsung has to spend to overcome the "organic" Apple advantage must be rather large.
It is indeed. Samsung spends a roughly-flat 15% of their revenue on advertising. As their cellphone share grows, this spending grows... to obscene levels.
I remember hearing that Samsung devotes a fixed proportion of its sales revenue to advertising, so in boom times they end up with ridiculous amounts of money in their marketing budget. This smells to me like their ad people literally have so much money now they can't work out what else to do with it.
I thought so too until I actually saw the page. Every single article is about the iPhone, it's actually hard to notice the Samsung ads (imho). I still think it was worth doing on the part of Samsung, but they'll probably get more traction from the press about buying all the ad space than the actual ad space itself.
