> Because when the product is free the real product is YOU.
I disagree with this conclusion. Also, I have a related issue with some of the opinions I hear e.g. on HN that confuse me.
Many a person says in defense of ads - "but surely authors have to support themselves, otherwise there'd be no site/software", "TANSTAAFL", etc. But this seems to me to be in disagreement with observable reality.
What I see is a strong and direct correlation between amount of ads and crappiness/dishonesty. For websites, it is usually "the more ads there are, the more likely content is wrong/crap/nonexisting and the author is there to take your money". For applications, similarly - more ads means crappier downloads, and - if it's the author's site that's full of banners - the program is most likely shit.
What I observe is that there are two reliable types of sources/downloads: 1) linked on author's site, free and free of ads - they signal that the author actually cares about the content they're providing (see "the toilet-paper companies"[0]) and 2) linked on author's site, that ask you to pay up front - here it signals that the author is honest.
So do the authors really have to "support themselves"? Or is it that the honest ones either do it for free (because they care, and they get money needed to support it elsewhere) or sell in clear terms? And the ad-dependent money makers have no business being on the Internet in the first place?
That's why I also feel no guilt for browsing with AdBlock on - neither the ads nor the ad-serving pages are a good deal for anyone in any way.
As for the Downloads.com, CNET, et al. - I hope that the introduction of Windows Store/package manager will shut them down for good. They're evil, they deserve to be down.
I've always considered the assertion that quality content is only created if there is financial reward to be a flagrant lie.
Expectations of ads fully supporting websites are relatively new even to the world wide web, let alone the internet. 10 years ago, you might at best hope that your ads would offset a bit of the websites hosting costs.
The really good content is put up by people who are in it because they care about the content, not the money. The same is true of software.
My experience is that if you are offering quality, you either give it away for free, or insist on up front payment.
Pay by ad, pay by data and in app purchase are all business models of people who want money and don't care about the content, but know their product isn't good enough to sell.
There is certainly a lot of great content created by people doing it for the love, but love only gets a person so far. To do real in-depth reporting takes quite a bit of time, way more than anyone but the independently wealthy have at their disposal unless they are working (and being paid) as professional reporters.
Consider the work on the Snowden files. Snowden handed his huge collection to professional reporters, who then spent weeks and months carefully reading it, confirming what they could independently, working with experts to understand what was most important, working with lawyers to understand what they could and not publish, and finally, writing and editing the articles.
Or consider investigative journalism pieces like the work that revealed the problems at the U.S. Veteran's Administration, or the Washington Post's series on civil asset forfeiture:
The Post and other news operations need to make money somehow, so that their reporters can afford to spend the time to keep doing this work. So far, ads are the only revenue source that seems reliable, although a lot of news ops are experimenting with online subscriptions as well.
Ok, but on the other hand consider the remaining 95% of content created by news sites, which is lies, clickbait, and total&utter crap. I very much apperciate investigative journalism for both the entertainment value and the function it provides to society - but that's a very, very small part of what gets published in papers, and the rest of what gets to the front pages of news sites is what makes them an example, not an exception, of my rule.
I applaud the work of professional journalists who care about stories they do and providing value to the public. So I want to support them, but not the other 95% published under the same banner. Because seriously, I get much better value from HN and Reddit comments, which not surprisingly, are both free and written by people who care.
I think there are probably far more people who will create crap content for financial reward than there are people who will create quality content for donations.
> That's why I also feel no guilt for browsing with AdBlock on
I understand the reasoning, but you seem to be taking it to a logical extreme. There are some reputable and useful sites that use ad income, I don't routinely use AdBlock or similar for that reason. If a site annoys me with its ads it gets DNS blacklisted (pointed towards my "you don't want to go there" page via local DNS config.
> neither the ads nor the ad-serving pages are a good deal for anyone in any way.
Hence the DNS blacklist, though this isn't overly helpful (mainly because new sites spring up constantly) and not useful to non-techies (most people don't run a local DNS cache that they can drop a new block into with a simple script call).
I am considering a browser extension that takes it from this point of view rather than the AdBlock point of view though, i.e. "I don't want to go to such sites" rather than "I'll go to such sites, but they aren't serving me ads and other crap". One of the many personal projects that will probably never see the light of day because I'm too busy with other things... (so if someone else wants to copy the idea, go ahead and I'll be an alpha/beta tester!). Something that either intercepts page transitions and warns "you've previously marked this site as having irritating pop-ups, are you sure you want to proceed?" and/or scans pages for links and visually marks those pointing towards marked domains. The next step would then be some sort of distributed store for collating what people mark so it can warn about sites I've not previously visited, though of course if such a thing became popular enough to be useful there would be the constant game of trying to stop people abusing this to block competitors sites or de-list their own.
> As for the Downloads.com, CNET, et al. ... they deserve to be down.
> There are some reputable and useful sites that use ad income, I don't routinely use AdBlock or similar for that reason. If a site annoys me with its ads it gets DNS blacklisted (pointed towards my "you don't want to go there" page via local DNS config.
This is something that sometimes actually crosses my mind. I acknowledge the existence of good people who rely on ad income (assuming they get something from ad views; I pretty much don't click on ads at all) and I'm willing to modify my behaviour to accomodate them. I sometimes unblock pages when they ask nicely (e.g. episodecalendar asks you if you could unblock ads when you have a free account, and since I actually get a real value out of this site (having my favourite shows pop up in Google Calendar, so I don't need to manually track new episodes), it was only fair that I unblock them).
From the division of Interesting Ideas That I Have No Time To Make, here's mine: an ad-block that instead of blocking ads, replaces them with crowd-sourced images of your choice - like "best of DeviantArt", Banksy pictures, ads for effective charities, etc. It was inspired by this picture I found once: http://editorial.designtaxi.com/news-banksycoke2405/big.jpg.
There was once an AdBlock extension that replaced ads with lolcats instead of removing them. I think it was an April Fool thing, but the code is probably still out there to be used as a starting point.
Another good option for replacing the ads would be to put appeals in place, things like the recent push for funding for the ebola hit areas in Africa, the appeals that followed tsunamis, famines, and other natural/humanitarian disasters, and so on.
Yes, that's also an excellent idea. The point is to allow people, per the quote I linked, to adapt the ad space to their own taste. Humanitarian appeals could be a good default. This could also solve the problem that some people complain about, that some pages have layouts built with ads in mind and become "uglier" when ads are blocked (not that I ever saw this actually happening).
I also run a local DNS blacklist that benefits everyone on my network, but I rarely update it since I started using the RequestPolicy Firefox extension. It supports the point of view of "Don't fetch resources from third party domains unless I need them." If a page is broken, I can temporarily or permanently add the missing resource for that domain or globally with a simple click. Denial by default is a much better strategy as it provides some real protection against serious threats like XSS, in addition to thwarting tracking and ads.
I disagree with this conclusion. Also, I have a related issue with some of the opinions I hear e.g. on HN that confuse me.
Many a person says in defense of ads - "but surely authors have to support themselves, otherwise there'd be no site/software", "TANSTAAFL", etc. But this seems to me to be in disagreement with observable reality.
What I see is a strong and direct correlation between amount of ads and crappiness/dishonesty. For websites, it is usually "the more ads there are, the more likely content is wrong/crap/nonexisting and the author is there to take your money". For applications, similarly - more ads means crappier downloads, and - if it's the author's site that's full of banners - the program is most likely shit.
What I observe is that there are two reliable types of sources/downloads: 1) linked on author's site, free and free of ads - they signal that the author actually cares about the content they're providing (see "the toilet-paper companies"[0]) and 2) linked on author's site, that ask you to pay up front - here it signals that the author is honest.
So do the authors really have to "support themselves"? Or is it that the honest ones either do it for free (because they care, and they get money needed to support it elsewhere) or sell in clear terms? And the ad-dependent money makers have no business being on the Internet in the first place?
That's why I also feel no guilt for browsing with AdBlock on - neither the ads nor the ad-serving pages are a good deal for anyone in any way.
As for the Downloads.com, CNET, et al. - I hope that the introduction of Windows Store/package manager will shut them down for good. They're evil, they deserve to be down.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8319102