Ad blockers, newspaper sites, etc.

[evamaria]

So, I said, after 12 or 15 years of IE, I switched to Chrome, and first thing I installed was AdBlock, oh my! So read here my defence speech!:

As for "ads needed in order to finance the sites", well, I understand the argument, but I mainly browse such news sites, and during these last months, there has been lots of propaganda there, in the way of "web users should PAY us for our quality journalism" (= on top of looking at ads, and of clicking on them, please...), when in fact, the only interesting thing there are the users' comments, and certainly not any "quality journalism" which is blatantly absent from such sites.

Also, they all cite the example of the NYT, and here, there IS quality journalism (as there is in guardian.co.uk, but in NOT ONE of the many German or French newspaper or weekly magazine sites), and so, welt.de or zeit.de, with their constant reminders of them delivering "quality journalism", went greatly on my nerves, these last months, all the more so since all of them, on top of delivering (heavily-biased) "news" those same newspapers would have been deeply ashamed of just 10 or 12 years ago (cf. spiegel.de and Der Spiegel today, and that same weekly newsmagazine 20 years ago, being the best one in the world at its time), AND their heavy censorship of those aforementioned user comments.

In fact, in order to get some "back-up" news or such, some details that shine a new light on the news they present, some info that better makes you understand what you hear and see, you now have to rely virtually exclusively upon some user comments, and this means you must be "thankful" to them for any such instructive user comment they do NOT censor as soon as possible, in order to "mainstream" their sites as much as they can. And yes, here and there, you even have the impression that they "leave some important info in" such user comments, instead of deleting them, because, here and there, they're just too ashamed of holding back ALL relevant facts, and not being allowed, from their owners, to present them themselves, they at least leave such info alone, when it comes from some well-informed user.

All this has brought me, a once heavily, and long-time paying reader of Der Spiegel, Die Zeit (both expensive weeklies) and FAZ (faz.net, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) to seriously thinking, get paid by your owners, and by those powerful people you do your daily propaganda for, and if you don't get paid enough that way, go to he**.

And this way, I never considered clicking on any of their ads, in order to get them some click money: I just endured those ads since for IE, there isn't a good ad blocker: Here, with Chrome, Adblock works tremendously well if I dare say!

As for blogs and other sites where ads "should" be clicked, well, it seems you can do some setting in Adblock or Adblock Plus, in order to see them again there... but I have to say, being not sure if a click was enough, or if I also had to do some clicking within that ad page, then, in order for the blog, etc. to get my click money (= without me buying anything there), I very rarely took the effort to click an such an ad, and then navigate within that site I wasn't interested in, and in any such case I wondered if what I did there was perhaps completely pointless, without my buying that crap on offering there.

So, having installed an adblocker now, after 12 or 15 years of browsing WITH ads, is also a means to get out of such schizophrenia to just SIMULATE interest in ads, in order to "help" bloggers, etc.

A similar phenomenon with Google ads (which ain't blocked this way): Very often, instead of getting good hits (within the very first 30 or 50 hits there), you just (or mostly) get crap, but also the ads of some overpriced offerings when in fact you want info, not buy unnecessary goods/services, and the very fact of not finding what I was searching for, triggered my clicks on such ads, in order to make them COST their unwanted advertizing.

But this is weird, unhealthy, or, as the French say, louche et malade!

We all pay a monthly fee for our browsing experience (in my case, 35 euro), and why not distribute some of this money (let's say 15 euro, or make it 25 plus 15, = 40 euro) evenly to those sites we spend our time in? Ok, this would undeservingly advantage those "newspaper" sites (in my case at least), since they would be paid for my reading "their" user comments... but it would certainly be a much healthier approach to webspace financing than all this unwanted advertizing now.

And not speaking here of all those Google ads like "lawyer (specialty) (town)" on which 90 p.c. of the clicks come from "another lawyer (same specialty) (same town)".

So discussing ads is discussing visual clutter, and burnt money... and whenever I want to buy something, I'm searching offers in vain that'd read "look here, we're NOT more expensive than our competitors, but we have a real good product/service: here's proof:..." Never ever. Everytime I want to spend money, I have to search for hours, delving into biased "reviews", offers made as intransparent as possible in order to make them as in-comparable as it gets, etc.

What's blatantly missing, especially, is a thing honorable vendors could easily do now, in most countries, and yes, even in Germany:

They could compare their product/service to those similar, by their competitors, and they could do it in an honorable way, listing not only their products' strengths and their competitors' products' weaknesses, but they could do a balanced, equilibrated, real comparison - at this condition = at this "price" of total honesty, they could even do it in Germany, where "comparative advertizing" had been forbidden for many years.

This way, products' and services' quality would be literally multiplied within a few years, and you know what this would imply for the "economies" of the Western Hemisphere:

They would literally roar up!

But no, "everybody" convenes instead in lying to us, in taking all efforts to have us not know the negative core aspects, in a word, they treat us like idiots: They BLUR our knowledge, instead of widening it up.

And that's why I'm very happy to use Chrome, with AdBlock, now, at last.

[vlastimil]

What you describe is true. Getting a non-biased review of anything is very very hard these days. It is even harder, usually impossible, to get a non-biased comparison of multiple products in the same category. Ads and paid reviews only make things worse. Getting unbiased news is a bit easier, but it usually are not the right kind of news. I mean news that really matter for more than a few days.

BTW, you should never click an ad because you like the web site it is on. (You can get the web site owner in trouble if you do this repeatedly.) On the other hand, if you hate ads in general, you should randomly click on anything you see anywhere to make it as hard as possible for the advertisers to make sense of their click data.

[Stoic Joker]

...you should randomly click on anything you see anywhere to make it as hard as possible for the advertisers to make sense of their click data.

-vlastimil (July 03, 2013, 10:11 AM)

 

[evamaria]

"you should randomly click on anything you see anywhere to make it as hard as possible for the advertisers to make sense of their click data"

Oh yeah, reading such an advice makes you spring up 1m up in the air!

Well, as for newspaper sites, I often HATE those newspaper sites even more than those advertisers, so I don't want them to get "my" money, even if this brings me the occasion to reprimand the advertiser (I said already there's unhealthy musings going on in reactions to ads...)! ;-)

What I already said above, sometimes, when I wanted to "bring" some money to some blog, I even went into "navigating" within the site clicked by me, for fear "just a click" would "not do it", but that on top of that, I had so simulate some "real interest" - I presume for most such linked ads, that's totally dispendable, though!

"You can get the web site owner in trouble if you do this repeatedly" - you're speaking of the advertizers' checking the respective dns addresses, of course, and that's another detail that really complicates things.

From what I "hear" in the web, for those google ads, it seems indeed be possible to click the ads of your competitors, again and again, every new day anew, with identical or very similar dns address, AND THEY HAVE TO PAY!!! INCREDIBLE!!!, and from what I see from my own dns address, my respective dns addresses, between browsing "sessions", are VERY similar, so that "manual checking" would indeed instruct the advertizer it's probably the same person / "household" (hence the problems you are speaking of since the advertiser would also (here, wrongly) suppose this clicking again-and-again was (be it technically, be it "socially") triggered by the owner of the respective site.

All the less so it's understandable that in similar circonstances (i.e. similar / identical searches in order to get the ad again and again, then click on it to trigger the payment to google), googles makes advertizers pay?!

Is there any first-hand knowledge available on this matter?


This being said, I'm VERY happy to "surf the web" with Chrome and AdBlock now, AND in the curse of this, I encountered some lines within a blog that I think are worth sharing. The lines, in German, went along this:

"If you like this blog, please consider turning off your ad blocker just for this blog here, and consider clicking on an ad here."

This is, without any doubt, a very smart way of handling ad blockers, on the part of a that blogger: His script checks if you have blocked his ads (that might be easy and just some lines of standard script you will probably find in the web), and if the check is positive, you get such a hint to which you will hopefull react if indeed you think his blog is worthwile.

The irony here is it was an awful blog I will certainly never return to, so I didn't do as he wanted, but the lesson is, HAD I considered his blog worthwile, I CERTAINLY would have tried to do as he said (don't know how to do it, but will check next time I'll get such an invitation, and WILL click on some ad), and many other people do hopefully do the same whenever they like some site (enough in order to take this little effort).

So this is certainly a very good idea, worth sharing for anybody maintaining a blog or any other "real estate" within the www.

[40hz]

I always liked how Jupiter Broadcasting (home of the Linux Action Show, and others) handled part of the revenue question. (Note: they also have a purely voluntary "subscription" model and have some regular advertisers on their shows. These advertisers regularly provide very good discount codes for Jupiter's visitors.)



They put affiliate links at the bottom their pages. But only after they first did a series of public announcements about how they worked. As was explained, if you're shopping at any of the listed sites, and you go there from the links, Jupiter gets a small percentage of each sale. It doesn't have any effect on the prices the person who uses them pays, or the discounts they may receive. The customer prices and terms are the same as if they went to the sites directly. But going through the link earns Jupiter Broadcasting a little something each time.

Sounds like a win-win to me. Costs you nothing out of pocket - and it helps support something you like.

[evamaria]

Kudos for this ad for jupiterbroadcasting.com. Since I didn't really understand the principle from your description, I went to their site, and there, I understood immediately, but also understood why I hadn't understood your post, spontaneously:

Unfortunately, there is a logical fault in this approach (if I understand it correctly): When you look at vids (very funny currently, Putin's gesture, right on their home page ("From Russia with love"), and I have to say that I've much difficulties to NOT like Putin these days (and remembering all the BAD things he did before and will do in the future), considering his stance in the Snowden affair: outrageously smart AND not too harmful to Edward (if I dare call him by his Christian name)).

(As for the Putin vid, for readers whenever the visual link will have vanished from their homepage ( I LOVE that (photoshopped) photo:

http://www.jupiterbr...th-love-unfilter-56/ )

As for the logical fault in this concept: When you look at vids, you will NOT buy books and such, and vice versa. So, whenever I buy something at those "affiliates", I would have to remember there was jupiterbroadcasting.com, go back there, then click the link there, then do my buyings... or just do my research?

Since on top of this, 99 p.c. of the time, I do my RESEARCH on amazon, but then do my "buys" within the interlibrary loan system between Germany's university libraries...

(and then, customer service of amazon.de has become so bad these days, whenever a problem occurs (and problems multiply with them, lately), and you try to phone them, they interrupt the communication, or when then you choose their "chat" function, they leave you without any answer for 10 or 15 minutes, when you finally will close down the communication for lack of any result)

but anyway, be it for research or for buying, having to go back to a specific site, in order to access the relevant site from there, in order to handle them over some p.c. of your possible purchase, is simply not realistic, and even when I buy with amazon.de, it's from links from idealo.de, since I want price comparison, and amazon's prices are far from being "good", most of the time, so SOMETIMES, the amazon price shown in idealo (or any other price comparison tool in the web) is "good" for me, but most of the time, it is not. Thus, in such instances, not going grom my price comparison tool to the vendor, but going back to a specific (video or other) side, in order to access the vendor?

"Come on"! Such a behavior is virtually inexistant, even when I really LIKE a specific site, I would not do it, for it being far too much fuss for me!

The inherent problem of all advertizing is, for us, intellectual "elite", most offerings in ads are simply sub-optimal, or more precisely, they are sub-optimal (as a serious offer to us, I mean) in almost ANY case, but the "underclass" will not bother (but buy whenever the advertizing is sufficiently strong, and the price isn't TOO outrageous, comparatively, and within their reach).

Thus, my - strictly personal - "answer" to this problem is, make available info in order to sell something else, which is related to your info (so there is a change to sell your product / service), but which is not so intimately related to your info that your info has to become biased / dishonest / fraudulent, i.e.

Have your info as honest and complete as possible, in theory. And yes, when I write my content, I somethings get stick to some content I so much would like to publish, but which would harm my business... but seriously, I try to publish it to the max, with withhelding a strict minimum of details, preferring to put them in a way that hopefully the effect of publishing them, i.e. of people "seeing" my honesty here, will overcome the dissuasive effect.

This is travelling on a rope, but whenever in doubt, I prefer to "say" it, and all the worse for my business lost to less honest contenders - but I'm not a saint or such: Whenever I "speak out" in such a way, I make sure my "open wording" will harm my contenders' businesses, too, if ever it's able to harm mine.

So I'm accustomed to "speak out" "difficult things".

And that's why as for "advertizing" in that sense we all encounter it all the time...

This being said, I could imagine technical ways to implement such a "deferral" you have presented here, and which would DO IT:

Some "special cookies", stored differently, stored elsewhere, but with the users' specific allowance, to begin with, and which then would, whenever you arrive at amazon.de or wherever.com, would "pop up", asking you, "xyz.com is a site from which we, in case, would get some p.c. - would you allow us to do a referral here?".

Without any hesitation, I would click "yes", even for real buys, for many more than just one site I regularly visit...

and of course, it would become VERY amusing whenever we'd get two or more such pop-ups, for the SAME site, and we would have to really choose then, who's going to get our money now?

And yes, I'd prefer ONE standard-pop-up dialog here, letting me choose. Remember, we're speaking here, exclusively, of referrers to which originally you will have given the permission to pop up this dialog! (And in such a dialog, there should be several options: "Yes", "Not now", AND "I revoke my permission to you to ask me that question ever again!".)

Under these circumstances, I'd be happy to have referrers have "my" money.