Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

The issue of Ad-Blocking in our browsers.

<< < (2/2)

40hz:
I'd be happy to pay for good content I'm interested in. I've paid for site access before, am paying some sites now, and remain completely open to paying for more content in the future.

Too bad there's so little content out there I personally consider worth paying for.

I suppose that's my acid test: If a certain site switched to subscription only - would I buy a subscription? If the answer is "no" then it's nothing I won't walk away from in a heartbeat if the "monetization" strategy the site is using becomes too obnoxious.

The sad truth (IMHO) is that very little of the information buffet making up today's Internet is worth paying for. Most of it is amateurish, badly researched (if researched at all), poorly presented, and painfully shallow.

If the Internet is a vast info-ocean, it's an ocean that's 10,000 miles wide - but only about a quarter-inch deep in most places.

Or so it seems to me.

TaoPhoenix:
I'd be happy to pay for good content I'm interested in. I've paid for site access before, am paying some sites now, and remain completely open to paying for more content in the future.

Too bad there's so little content out there I personally consider worth paying for.

I suppose that's my acid test: If a certain site switched to subscription only - would I buy a subscription? If the answer is "no" then it's nothing I won't walk away from in a heartbeat if the "monetization" strategy the site is using becomes too obnoxious.

The sad truth (IMHO) is that very little of the information buffet making up today's Internet is worth paying for. Most of it is amateurish, badly researched (if researched at all), poorly presented, and painfully shallow.

If the Internet is a vast info-ocean, it's an ocean that's 10,000 miles wide - but only about a quarter-inch deep in most places.

Or so it seems to me.

-40hz (October 03, 2013, 11:16 AM)
--- End quote ---

Not seems ... is.

You eval it on a site by site basis. X site becomes known for x1 stuff. Y site becomes known for Y1 stuff. As joked by xkcd and quietly acknowledged by game show producers, the internet is good at "factoids". Books (and "post-books" etc) still seem to reign for deep knowledge. There's a reason I have 2000 books on my shelf ... because the internet can't yet match any one of them in sequential order. Yes, if I spent 100 hours carefully building 1400 search queries I might slowly assemble one, but ... see?

Books *by definition* have X amount of knowledge! (Yes, white space etc, but I'm Anti-WhiteSpace. Rant elsewhere.) So that is/was what a bookstore used to be for ...
A. You didn't know X book existed, and you can't search for what you don't know.
B. Yay it exists. So you can look at *all of it*. Limited basically only by store hours and maybe in a few cases a hyper manager. With some practice you can get good at speed-evals. If the book keeps impressing you every five pages for 400 pages... you buy it. Simple. None of the DRM limited junk where chapters 1, 8, 14, and 22 are good and the rest are junk...

Ad-infested layouts really make "content" seem more than it is. Yes, they are passably well designed. Blocked almost right, fills a screen page, etc. But yes, once you actually look at the "article", especially if you play the game where you copy it into notepad/other, it's pretty thin! Even with all the Ad blockers on, the page wastes space with self-promotion junk. Like Me, Feeds, Twitters, and more.

TaoPhoenix:

This begins to overlap with my threads on the anti-javascript plugins. "Ad blocking" increasingly means site-served stuff. Forbes is coming to mind with horrible "sliders".

CWuestefeld:
As others have said, it's the annoying ads that are the problem.

I run AdBlock Plus in my browsers. But I've disabled it for DC, and for some other sites. I don't object to ads as such, and indeed, when they're topical, they can even be useful.

But ads that interfere with my usage are the problem. Animated ads that demand your attention still are common. My wife uses Chinese pages all the time, and these frequently look like someone vomited on them; I've added dozens of custom rules to ABP for her.

At a minimum, if you don't allow the ads to detract from the experience of the web page you've worked so hard on, then I'm willing to go along with it. But when you let the ads try to invade my experience, then I don't want to allow that.

Edvard:
The saddest part:

Having worked at (and left in disgust) an ad-driven company, the answer is simple and clear: The most annoying ads yield the best click-through rates
--- End quote ---

I can believe it, thoroughly and whole-heartedly, after talking with absolute idiots doing bizarre things with their cellphones and expecting me at customer service to fix it, after multiple times telling my mother-in-law what's OK and not OK to click while surfing political sites and I still have to spend 3 hours every time I visit because "the computer is running a little slow, can you take a look at it?" only to find that not only is it slow, but half the start menu and desktop icons are gone because "We have detected a virus on your computer.  Totally clean the virus now for only $29.99!", and taking a handful of Tylenol after reading my mother's posts on Facebook "This is not a hoax!  Confirmed by Snopes... "
 :-\

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page