Dealing With 'Advertising Pollution' 418
theodp writes: "Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn't exist without it," writes longtime ad guy Ken Segall in The Relentless (and annoying) Pursuit of Eyeballs. "Unfortunately, for some this is simply license to abuse. Let's call it what it is: advertising pollution." CNN's in-your-face, your-video-will-play-in-00:25-seconds approach, once unthinkable, has become the norm. "Google," Segall adds, "is a leader in advertising pollution, with YouTube being a showcase for intrusive advertising. Many YouTube videos start with a mandatory ad, others start with an ad that can be dismissed only after the first 10 seconds. Even more annoying are the ad overlays that actually appear on top of the video you're trying to watch. It won't go away until you click the X. If you want to see the entire video unobstructed, you must drag the playhead back to start over. Annoying. And disrespectful." Google proposed using cap and trade penalties to penalize traditional polluters — how about for those who pollute the Internet?
i'm glad to work for free (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of Youtube is professionally produced videos where youtube shares the ad revenue with the creator. That's how people make money to be able to produce more videos.
you either get rid of advertising and pay to watch each video, or you put up with advertising. My account is enabled for revenue sharing, but i rarely upload anything and don't rely on it. but if took and produced videos and relied on ad revenue, i would stop very fast if i didn't get paid.
No Advertising does not power the Internet. (Score:5, Insightful)
No Advertising does not power the Internet. Bogus assertion to begin the article. The internet ran fine before the ads. It would run fine without them. Advertising is one aspect of the internet. It does not power the internet in any way, shape or form.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
"advertising is what powers the internet" (Score:4, Insightful)
No. The internet was implemented by the federal government, funded by citizen taxes, and later extended as part of the communications infrastructure. The internet was not invented to serve businesses, it was invented to serve the citizens.
For those who voluntarily go to ad laden websites, you can't regulate self harm.
why? (Score:4, Insightful)
CNN's in-your-face, your-video-will-play-in-00:25-seconds approach, once unthinkable, has become the norm.
Why unthinkable? Why should free video be so very different from free TV?
advertising does NOT power the Internet (Score:2, Insightful)
I used the Internet, quite happily and successfully, for more than a decade, before HTTP (curse you, Tim Berners-Lee) began to intrude on the experience. I would be very happy to go back to those days. Throw in an IRC/FTP/RTP+RTSP "subscription" for content, and there's nothing I would miss.
The old adage about TV ("99 channels and nothing on") applies to the web, but with several orders more magnitude of noise to signal.
Re:No Advertising does not power the Internet. (Score:2, Insightful)
The Internet was vastly better then by any measure. It wasn't used to commit financial crimes, to dupe people, to invade privacy, or to spy on whole populations. It especially didn't destroy more jobs than it's created and eliminate whole industries, and cause the vast amounts of unemployment and underemployment that have resulted from its going mainstream.
What has made the Internet the cesspool it is today is advertising, corporatism, and the kind of control and attempted control that goes with the undereducated being turned loose on something shiny.
Re:Good point (Score:4, Insightful)
Use adblock, it gets rid of ALL the adds on youtube. And if it's not your device, just hit F5 and you should get something else.
The amusing part is that youtube know this and has not "fixed" it. I guess they realize we are not a receptive market for that crap.
Re: You dorks (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with ads on a very fundamental level. they're manipulative and serve to change and circumvent logic and the decision making process. I don't appreciate anything or anyone that is intentionally trying to manipulate me.
I am still going to go to all the same web sites as I always have but you can bet I'm going to adblock as many ads as tectonically possible. The industry brought it upon themselves by pushing the intrusiveness way to far. I don't feel guilty in the slightest.
Re:i'm glad to work for free (Score:5, Insightful)
you either get rid of advertising and pay to watch each video, or you put up with advertising.
I have no objection to paying for ad-free stuff. Of course, to be fair, I'd then like a refund on the part of the price of the stuff I buy that goes to advertising it.
That's the worst thing about advertising - it's surely more expensive than just paying directly, as you have to pay people to make the ad, plus various extra middlemen. And in return for that extra money you get to be assaulted by obnoxious audiovisual pollution.
Re:No Advertising does not power the Internet. (Score:4, Insightful)
Also those sliding "give us your email' boxes (Score:5, Insightful)
I've noticed a really annoying trend, where you're on a site for a 10-20 seconds reading their content, when this (presumably JavaScript) box pops in front of the content soliciting for your email address. This is really annoying, since it totally breaks the concentration on what you're reading. Since this apparently done with JavaScript provided by the hosting site, pop-up window blockers and cross-script blockers don't prevent it.
So here's a hint for web designers: THIS IS F***KING ANNOYING! STOP IT!
Thank you.
Re:You dorks (Score:5, Insightful)
Ads and marketing in general have evolved from simple, respectful "hey, try this! It's good" into manipulative nonsense. Few people can see through it and the result has been devastating to them. It has shaped and certainly harmed the culture of the US and even results in violence in some extreme cases where people want things so badly they hurt and kill each other to get it. Though most will disagree exactly when things have gone "too far" few will disagree that they have.
Re:Good point (Score:2, Insightful)
> The amusing part is that youtube know this and has not "fixed" it. I guess they realize we are not a receptive market for that crap.
Fixing it would break other things like non-browser access. Attempting to fix it in a way that still let non-browsers work would just escalate the problem such that we'd see browser plugins that emulate such devices - even if youtube forced ads into the same video stream and then rate-limited the video stream to make you always wait the length of the ad, someone would write a plugin to send the ad to /dev/null and show you some other video during the mandatory wait-time.
As it is now, I just drag-and-drop youtube URLs into VLC since VLC is so much more pleasant to use than the embedded one. For DRM'd videos I use a little wrapper around youtube-dl that plays it in VLC.
Installed AdBlock years ago... (Score:-1, Insightful)
...and I've got no idea what the internet looks like to mere mortals anymore.
I'm almost afraid to turn it off and see just how bad it's gotten out there.
Back in 2012, the average rate was 9.26%
http://clarityray.com/Content/... [clarityray.com]
I have to imagine adblocking has only gotten more common since.
Re:You dorks (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly you nailed it. For those that say that the ads have become manipulative, sorry but how are they different than old TV? Sure we have Tivo like apps but the reality is that commercials have always been in your face. It is just that on the Internet we have become used to non-invasive free Internet (as in free beer). The fact that this has changed does not surprise me in the least. Don't like it, do like the parent poster said, don't vist the site. Or better yet fork over money so that sites don't need ads.
Re:No Advertising does not power the Internet. (Score:3, Insightful)
> It was also low bandwidth. The modern Internet is a lot of expensive to produce and deliver content.
Bandwidth costs have dropped exponentially since then.
We are looking at a 2000x drop in pricing from 1998 to the end of this year. [drpeering.net]
In 1998 it was $1200.00/Mbps by 2015 it will be $0.63/Mbps
Re:You dorks (Score:5, Insightful)
For those that say that the ads have become manipulative, sorry but how are they different than old TV?
Well for one thing on old TV ads didn't pretend to be part of the show you were watching. Viewing them didn't turn your computer into a botnet, track your every move or adorn your sets control knobs and television cabinet with vendor advertising. TV ads also lack self awareness.
Re:You dorks (Score:5, Insightful)
"Also, you don't have to go to the CNN site if you don't like their ads. No one actually forced you to read CNN. It is their media property, they can do what they wish."
Sure, just as it's our right to render on our screens only what we wish.
And we do that.
Re:i'm glad to work for free (Score:5, Insightful)
you either get rid of advertising and pay to watch each video, or you put up with advertising.
False dilemma. We could watch the video with adblock plus installed and not let you waste our time with some ad selling bullshit we don't care about.
i would stop very fast if i didn't get paid.
Good. Take your ball and go home. The internet could use a few less for-profit entities twisting their content in order to maximize cashflow.
Re:No Advertising does not power the Internet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Notice that the guy who said it is an advertising guy. That's his whole worldview. That's the way he thinks it is and the way he thinks it should be. Meanwhile for the rest of us, we have lots of alternatives. Paid sites, community-supported sites, ad-blocked sites, sites run by people who love what they are running a site about.
Basically this is a little advertiser wanting us to support clubbing a big advertiser, Google. He'd like us to get mad at his competition. What he wouldn't like is for us to start noticing just how much what he is advocating is in his self-interest.
I recommend we all switch to ad-block and screw them all. If some sites die or have to switch funding models, works great for me.
Re:You dorks (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't get to decide things you don't pay for. The people that pay for things gets to decide them.
If you ever feel the need to install an ad blocker, you're doing it wrong.
Hence why CNN doesn't get to decide whether their ads display on the computer I paid for or not.
Re:No Advertising does not power the Internet. (Score:5, Insightful)
There were many people producing their own content on the Internet before big business saw a profit in it. To frame them all as pasty-faced nerds is disingenuous and obviously false. These were ordinary people exchanging ideas and sharing whatever they felt was worth sharing. This was, and still is, the crux of the Internet's greatness.
The kind of content you mention is the kind of content that does not utilize the unique interpersonal capabilities of the Internet. That stuff is ordinary mass media content that has moved to the Internet only because the corporations producing it were losing their readership and revenue to the Internet (see previous paragraph.) They came here to fight for our eyeballs and our opinions because we chose to ignore them in favor of communicating with each other.
Advertising, as irritating as it can be, can help us to distinguish between content motivated by money (probably distributed by a giant corporation with an ulterior motive of keeping you suckling at their teat while feeding you politically slanted pseudo-news) and content motivated by some other impetus. For me, content that is laden with irritating advertisements practically screams "don't listen to me! I'm a scumbag!"
I'd much rather hear from ordinary people who have enough respect for me to tell their story without trying to monetize me. Lucky for us, plenty of those people still exist on the Internet.
(properly formatted this time)
Re:i'm glad to work for free (Score:5, Insightful)
you either get rid of advertising and pay to watch each video, or you put up with advertising.
I choose the former. 100%. Now how do I do that on Youtube?
Re:Ads are good for the internet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Correction: The Internet as you know it would be gone. The actual Internet would be just fine. Universities, stores, hobby sites, government, and people generally interested in communicating with each other would pay their ISP bills and continue without interruption.
Did you just suggest I pay for something online? Damn, I've never been more offended in my entire life. I use Facebook for my corporate website, Gmail for my inbox, and YouTube to distribute my advertising. Why the hell would I pay for anything?!?
Sincerely,
(The reason we're here today)
Re:i'm glad to work for free (Score:5, Insightful)
Good. Take your ball and go home. The internet could use a few less for-profit entities twisting their content in order to maximize cashflow.
Wish I had mod points, I couldn't agree more. I liked the web better before the commercial gold rush. Of course, I've been blocking ads since they began appearing, so that's not a big problem - but content was better before, IMO. And the whole spying game began with, and continues to be driven by, advertisers.