I posted this question because I once saw a tweet that said something like:
“If you use adblock, you don’t care about creator’s point blank”
What is your opinion on this? Do you agree with them?
Of course. And I’ll continue to do so as long as advertisement is detrimental to my online experience. If it wastes my time by forcing me to watch an ad before a video, if it distracts me from reading a text because of animations, if it tries to scam or shock me, I’m better off blocking it. I’m not against advertisement as communication that a useful product or service exists, I’m against advertisement abuse and greed.
I’ll happily pay for, donate to, or otherwise support services important to me that need and deserve it.
If you, as a creator, choose to use advertising to monetize your content you don’t respect the limited lifetime of the people consuming your content or their security or about the way the marketing and advertising industry is destroying our society, such as (not exhaustive, just off the top of my head right now)
- building a surveillance economy, destroying privacy in the process
- manipulating people into voting in certain ways that are harmful to them and others
- protecting harmful products from scrutiny (e.g. tobacco, alcohol, products with too much sugar or fat or low quality ingredients, the car and oil industries, corporate climate change denial,…)
- encouraging overconsumption both in terms of quantity and in terms of items or services they don’t really need
- destroying content platforms with their mantra “not advertiser friendly”, leading to dystopian self-censorship on e.g. Youtube
And then there is the way internet advertising can spread malware and compromise the security of websites in general.
If you do want to monetize content in other ways there are models such as subscriptions or Patreon-style that are a lot more respectful of the user.
Absolutely. I understand things aren’t for free, but if you make my experience subpar I’m blocking ads.
I wish more creators would make content available across more platforms.
Oh yeah, I completely forgot to mention the way the advertising industry has basically ignored every feedback from users for two decades or more by making ads ever more intrusive and obnoxious. They reap what they sow.
If I don’t block ads, then I’m stealing from the advertiser who’s paying per impression to someone who isn’t interested in their crap.
If the ad makes noise, moves around the screen, crashes my browser, or otherwise actively interferes with my ability to obtain the information I was looking for, It’ll leave me with such a negative impression that I won’t buy anything from that brand, now or ever – or from the creator who allowed them to break an otherwise good website.
So really, by blocking ads, I’m defending the good reputation of both creators and their sponsors.
yes, because no ads basically means my antivirus software has nothing to do. Creators have no choice over what ads are served up with the content and 99% of ads are loaded with malware whether you click on them or not.
Creators need to come up with better ways to monetise their content instead of relying on them.
As the de facto IT guy for my family, I block ads on all their computers just as a basic safety measure.
I can usually spot a fake download button and avoid scammy sites, but my parents and grandparents seem magnetically attracted to them
Plus there are ads now that give you plague just by loading them, which is uniquely horrifying to those of us who are informal tech support. D:
Adblockers are absolutely necessary because ads are a malware threat, never mind the scams and invasive popups. The cReAtOrS didn’t care enough to ensure advertisements were safe, legitimate, or not horribly obnoxious so they did it to themselves.
I used to allow ads for certain sites but after malware attempts and scam ads, I block them across the board. If that upsets anybody, go whine to the shady advertises who made this a necessity to browse the web safely.
Counter point: Any creator blindly putting random ad networks on their site doesn’t care about their users. Every ad should be vetted and served by the creator, those kinda ads are impossible to mass-block. If an ad swindles a user, it should be the creators reputation thats at stake.
I stopped having a bad conscience for blocking when one blog who begged promised to not autoplay any audio. The very next day it of course showed a very loud ad, and the creator excused it with “he didn’t have any control over what the advertisement network showed”.
This is exactly what I was thinking. How many incredibly sketchy, scammy, or outright invasive ad scripts are we supposed to tolerate? For me the answer is “none” and I’m quite happy that way.
They’re creators alright, but what are they creating? The answer is a surveillance capitalist dystopia.
“If you don’t pledge fealty to your feudal Lord, you don’t care about the artists for which he is patron.”
I don’t care about creators who demand that I surrender my privacy as the only valid show of support for them.
I use AdBlock (and SponsorBlock on YouTube, and a cookie whitelist and a JavaScript whitelist) because only I decide what to see on my screen.
- I don’t like getting bombarded with ads.
- It hides scam ads.
- If the creator of something makes something I like I prefer to directly donate to them instead of giving up my privacy, and letting a company like google profit of it, and then they only give a small portion to the creator.
This “you don’t care about creators” is a sham argument designed to make you feel guilty. I hear this about piracy a lot. “You’re depriving all those blue collar people of a paycheck!” meanwhile the WGA has been on strike for weeks because big studios are screwing them over on pay. It’s the corporate executives that are screwing these people over not some individual who downloaded a torrent or installed an adblocker. One only needs to look at who is funneling all the money into their own pockets and it surely isn’t the general public.
I own my computer, and I control what is displayed on it. I can do anything I want to control what is and isn’t on my screen. It is not my problem if the majority of content is reliant on an ineffective monetization method.
I do wish someone would make an ad block that faked impressions. But it would probably lose the advantages of fast load times, security etc.
This plugin supposedly kind of does that. I remember a few years ago Google removed it from the Chrome store, which I took as a good sign.
I never gave it a go though so I don’t know how well it works nor if it’s maintained; not only am I a bit too lazy to try to do some of that research myself, I also don’t browse that many different websites to consider I could have relevant data.
I stopped using Ad Nauseum because at some point I needed the latest update of uBlock Origin and haven’t switched back, but it fakes clicks. Not sure if it’s actually effectice, but the express purpose is moreso to throw off targeted advertising iirc.
Faking impression is extremely hard to do, there are billion dollar companies out there that exist literally to stop ad fraud as their primary purpose.
I have been with this idea for a very long time. But over time all the platforms got more and more greedy and I had the feeling that my privacy got more and more invaded.
Since that time, I have an Adblock and use DDG.
Sorry content creators.
Agree 100% with this
I’m not a hardcore capitalist. Also i can’t watch all the ads the corporations would like to feed me every day. So i’m fine with using an adblocker. Don’t give stuff out for free on the internet if you don’t like this. But since you ask: I really don’t like that strategy to commercialize everything, to finance everything by selling ads and user data…
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are you a capitalist tho? I mean, I consider myself a capitalist and let’s just say people don’t agree with me a lot here. anyways, how has this platform been treating you
lol. i watched way too much star trek when i was a kid. i would consider myself as someone who dislikes capitalism. but that’s my private thing. i like having money available to buy food, eat nice noodles or go on vacation every now and then. but i wouldn’t be sad if that somehow worked without the concept of money or some of the big companies.
i like this platform. i’m fine, thanks for asking.
The story of internet ads is a classic greed to ruins fable. People put up with static picture and text ads for a very long time, and many, myself included, still don’t mind them. In fact, self-hosting picture and text ads is almost guaranteed to get through adblockers.
But then the ads started moving. They started playing sound. They started executing code and phoning home to third party servers and collecting user data without consent. They started consuming more system resources than the webpage itself. Malware started being distributed through it, and there was even a recent breakthrough of ad cryptominers, because, again, they literally execute arbitrary code on your computer!
At this point our trust in ads are irreversibly broken. We will never tolerate ads again like we did when they hadn’t done all this, even if they promises to clean up their act. Adblock was developed as not just something to remove unsightly ads, but also, and I do not exaggerate when I say this, as a line of defense for the security and usability of your computer. It’s like an antivirus, but it kicks in before the virus even reaches your computer! For this reason, I think adblockers are not only okay to have, but essentially a mandatory item for browsing today’s internet. If you want revenue in spite of that, maybe set up a tip jar and/or go back to self-hosted text and picture ads, I’m not disabling adblock and opening myself to harm because, no offense, I genuinely do not trust you.
deleted by creator
I use adblock because it makes the internet usable. There’s just so much crap shoved in your face these days. Not just ads that are blocked, but sponsored search results and SEO crap that you have to use your time and energy to filter out. I don’t know how anybody actually buys stuff or responds to internet ads. I’m more and more on the Dead Internet Theory bandwagon.
