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?
Good point (Score:5, Interesting)
I sat down to watch Paddington Bear with my 19 month old son.
The advert that I couldn't skip was for a horror movie.
Thanks, youtube. That was *fantastic*.
Reason I installed addblock. (Score:5, Interesting)
I installed addblock because videos and streams I watched had add volume loudness so loud that it was a real problem. I often watch videos during the night and when the loudness jumps up for the adds it becomes annoying really fast. And that was the only reason.
I don't really mind adds and I know they run the content creators, but just that one small issue was enough for me.
When "free" isn't free (Score:4, Interesting)
This is because most or all website revenue comes from advertising. CBS has ads, but Netflix doesn't. Books don't, and newspapers and magazines have a limited amount, because part of their revenue comes from selling their publications to consumers. (Without ads, a copy of something like National Geographic or Playboy would cost $20 or more.)
The problem is that we don't have a good way of buying small amounts of content online. You can subscribe to some sites by the month or year, or perhaps buy limited access via PayPal, but the cost tends to be $ or $$ or $$$, and nobody wants to subscribe to CNN or YouTube. They want to see that video now, with no registration and commitment. The answer is the great lost Internet opportunity of 15 years ago: micropayments. If there was an easy and universal system for paying (say) a few cents to watch a video, why not? It'd be trivial for viewers, but could add up to real money for sites.
If I were a huge content provider, I'd figure out a way to make it happen, perhaps through ISPs. Subsidize them to give every user maybe $10/month credit. Offer content providers a great deal to install a one-click "Read/Watch Now for 1 cent" buttons. Get people used to paying tiny amounts of money to view content. If something like this could get going, it'd benefit content providers of all sizes. E.g. a comedian who writes one joke a day could make a living with 10,000 readers paying 1 cent per day ($100/day = $36,500/year).
Let's call it what it is: SPAM (Score:5, Interesting)
Ads are spam. Does spam power email? Do pirates power seafaring?
Re:"advertising is what powers the internet" (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it really wasn't. .edu (as latter became) only.
The internet was invented to be an interesting communication protocol.
Later on, commercial entities and the general public got connected to it.
For a _long_ time, it was
Imagining that the internet was destined to win, and there were no alternatives is revisionist history.
The internet very nearly didn't win, avoiding being relegated to a communications experiment that died likely sometime around 2000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org] - as an example of a competing service that lasted a long time, in the face of growing internet.
Aol, compuserv, and all of the other services didn't quite get joined up fast enough to make the internet irrelevant.
It was quite possible that this could have happened.
They decided that it was in their commercial interests to isolate their services, so that you couldn't email people on different networks.
This (amongst other similar issues) ended up killing them as other than ISPs when the internet took over this function.
If, for example, AOL, compuserv, Prodigy et al had gotten together and made it possible to email other services members, a prime reason for the explosion of the internet would have gone away.
Similarly, minitel could be a model of what the 'internet' might have looked like if the internet had not won.
It would be very, very different.
Network effects are _powerful_.
Re:Ads are good for the internet. (Score:5, Interesting)
People seem to forget, the internet RUNS on advertising money. It's what pay's the "real" bills for servers, staff & redbull's.
People used to have their own web sites about their hobbies and interests.. they used to actually participate until mass media came along and turned the network into a TV set. It was standard practice to offer users personal home pages when they signed up for Internet service.
IMO, if ads stopped across all internet sites, or the online advertising industry completely collapsed. The internet as we know it, would be gone.
Good riddance.
advertisement doesn't work (Score:4, Interesting)
...except, of course, for the ad companies selling it to companies who try to get sales. I'm not in marketing, but I got some insider information from people who are, and they all say that about 50% of all the money put into advertisement has basically the same effect on sales as burning it would have. The only reason it is wasted this way is that a) many customers don't know it and - more importantly - b) they don't know which 50%.
But, as in so many things, when something stops being effective, the first answer to the problem is to do more of it. The enemy has built bunkers against our bombs? Drop more bombs! The virus is becoming immune to our medicine? Raise the dosage. People have begun to ignore or block advertisement? Throw more ads their way.
Yes, it is pollution, the term is spot on.
Adblock, NoScript, DoNotTrackMe. (Score:4, Interesting)
Really, I don't know what I'd do without them. Probably stop using the Internet as much as I do now, find some alternatives, or do a hell of a lot more bitching.
When running a fresh new installation of a web browser, the first ad I see immediately causes me to halt everything I'm doing and install those three plugins. Annoyingly, I usually don't even hit two consecutive websites before that happens--the wretched fucking things are literally everywhere. Video ads really fucking piss me off, and even more on Android, because the god damn things are *designed* to reduce your access to the system, which effectively prevents installing ad blocking software without gaining root.
I have actually in the past, when confronted with an ad while trying to watch a video, cranked the volume all the way down and turned the phone upside down. If I did happen to see what brand was advertising, I add them to my mental blacklist of products and services to AVOID. Yes, I am so against advertising, it has the exact *opposite* effect on me when it comes to buying things. I'm sorry, but I can think for myself, I can do my own research and come up with an educated conclusion as to what I want or need. I don't fucking need someone spewing bullshit, trying to force me to buy their junk.
These days? When I even come across ONE ad when attempting to watch YouTube, I have zero tolerance. I close it. It is not worth the hassle. If I want to watch something bad enough, it will be on a proper computer with the necessary extensions. Android is one of the worst platforms to visit web pages or watch videos on.
Re:You dorks (Score:2, Interesting)
Cable television (paid for monthly by the consumer) has been absolutely raped by advertisers, thus diminishing its value. It's even worse online where it can (and does) affect user's PCs with (at least) reduced battery life and (at worst) tracking mechanisms and malware.
Re:i'm glad to work for free (Score:4, Interesting)
They've invented adblock detectors.
They don't show the video unless you allow the ad to show.
So at the least, the game rachets up a notch.
At the worst, adblock's days are numbered.
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TV used to have 52 minutes of content for 8 commercials.
Now it has 42 minutes of content for 18 commercials.
And in some cases 39 minutes of content for 23 minutes of content (by over laying the credits of the prior show with commercials).
I mostly just don't watch it any more.
But I've also gotten really good at not seeing the commercials. At first I had to try but now it's like I can sort of go blind and deaf to the commercials until the show comes back on.