Rupert Loman, owner of Gamer Network which boasts Eurogamer, Games Industry, Rock Paper Shotgun, VG247 and more within its network of sites, says that ad-blockers are a real threat to the future of journalism.
“Ad blocking is probably the biggest existential threat to the future of online games journalism,” he told MCV.
Cry me a river.
The reality is while it doesn’t even cover server costs in many current cases, the real reason why the “quote articles and provide links” news-website trend started was the ad profit.
I completely and totally agree with Thom on this. If your ads are unintrusive and not f*****g animated flash or unskippable video ads wasting the precious metered bandwith, most people have no trouble whitelisting the site if they get a friendly reminder from the site.
Just look at sites like OSNews, AOL reader or sweclockers, they all have done it the right way and the ads are not annoying and thus whitelisted.
Do we have any statistics on what number of adblockers use whitelists?
teamatar,
This default whitelist can be disabled easily enough, but it’s an ironic twist that the adblock devs themselves are in a very strong position to demand a share of advertising income.
Edited 2015-07-23 20:38 UTC
Which is reason enough for me to disable it. All these 3rd-party ad agencies track like crazy, and I’ve seen so much malware get into people’s machines this way via someone clicking on the damn ad. Sure the ad might not have malware in it, but that’s no guarantee of the page to which you’ll be taken if you’re unfortunate enough to click it.
“Ad blocking is probably the biggest existential threat to the future of online games journalism in its current form,”
Fixed
Edited 2015-07-23 11:07 UTC
I’d personally prefer a adblocker that blocks all but one ad and one tracker on every page I visit. So the sites can still earn something; and then maybe they’d even optimize their ads and care to have one good high-quality ad instead of twenty low quality ads everywhere. It’s not right to block everything, but many sites have gone too far in the other direction and adblocker is the only response visitors can make.
Alternatively, the search-engines could increase their focus on speed. Ad-heavy sites are slow sites. If they started dropping out of search result pages i favor of sites with a more sensible amount of ads, they’d have to change too.
Not to mention the horrible experience they can cause on mobile devices. I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve had to give up on a site due to an intrusive ad that’s filled the screen, is uncloseable (chasing the ‘x’ button up the screen, anyone?) or just slowing the phone to a crawl.
I would like browsers to stop animation and sound. Make it static. Just load the ads and make a screenshot and show that in the page. Maybe make them grayscale if they are still too irritating.
Might be a nice browser for adblockplus to make…
Slippery slope here. If “the industry” were to prevent ad blocking, what’s next? Spam Filtering? We will be seeing articles about how “companies cannot make money because their Email is not getting to the designated recipient. These are honest companies trying to get the word out on the goods they have to offer.” Then we will see clients changed so you cannot filter Email, have to open an Email before you delete it, and have it open for 15 seconds so that it seems you “read it”.
This is way overstated, but not too far off from what seems to be happening. The DVR manufacturers are being sued by the networks for making a “commercial skip” feature available. The internet is trying to find ways to force us to see ads. The whole problem is that there are so many ads, we have become desensitized to them, so it’s becoming an arms race to get our attention. Hence the obnoxious flashy and video ads.
This will not end well.
More fundamentally, the problem is that people expect everything to be provided to them for free. The proliferation of modern web services provides massive utility to users, but the users seldom want to pay.
I don’t know about you, but I pay for my Internet service. Imagine if Game of Thrones was broken up with commercials, you’d be pissed right? Because you pay for HBO as a service. Well I pay CenturyLink for a service, I don’t want it to be interrupted by ads.
This problem of them not getting revenue because a lot of people use adblock would not have been a problem if they had kept the ads minimal in the first place.
When you’re trying to read through an article and it’s formatting is bouncing to the far left and then far right because ads are interspersed between, you start to just give up on reading such things, making having an Internet account almost pointless.
I am on a few sites that basically give you ads unless you login with a free registration account and I really don’t have a problem with that, since you tend to contribute to sites where you have accounts.
But really, when a single website can kill the performance of your whole computer because of some horribly designed ad, you know that journalism on that site isn’t worth reading. So I say ‘meh’ to those ass hats.
I mostly agreed with everything else you said in your comment but your opening statement and analogy is all wrong… You pay for HBO (aka the content) so yeah no ads. You pay CenturyLink only for the connection and none of that money goes to any websites (aka the content). Websites serve the ads NOT CenturyLink so they can provide content which is not free.
Edited 2015-07-24 17:02 UTC
I agree with comments here, too many bad experiences with ads.
Just day before yesterday I clicked on a website link from search results in the default “Internet” browser on my SGS4. After reading 1 sentence, a full sized ad popped up. I “closed” it only to have the page navigate elsewhere, and open up the Google Play app with some crap free game listing. OK, downloaded Firefox, installed AdblockPlus, replaced the browser on my start screen.
“Most likely is that technical solutions to ad blocking will be found, and we’ll see an arms race between those who wish to block, and those who wish to assert their right to fund the service they provide.â€
Why does this say “wish to block” vs “wish to assert their right to fund the service they provide” (by preventing blocking)? Is it suggested that there a right to prevent blocking but no right to block? That’s what it sounds like it’s suggesting.
# aptitude install xul-ext-adblock-plus
Self-serving BS pisses me off.
Some publishers can’t live with just few words high quality articles, like:
“Cry me a river”
They’re a threat to themselves.
The intrusive annoying ads are a threat to news.
It’s a basic rule of good tech that you start with users – and find out what will please them or annoy them. DSchool design step 1 is “empathise with the user”.
Anyone who annoys users deserves to go out of business.
The “arms race” started years ago. Now there are adblock detection scripts, and adblocker rules to prevent them from loading. As for “at the mobile device level”, Apple is bringing ad blocking capacity to Safari on iOS 9 via an addon API. The tears will be glorious when that gets popular.
Yeah, because Apple will never make exceptions for specific ad providers based on how much money they have. I’m sure Apple is happy to block their own iAds, too.
An even better point might be questioning what in particular makes it ad blockers a larger threat to game journalism as opposed to just journalism in general? Local and National newspapers and their websites aren’t garnering enough in ads either.
Maybe the biggest threat to journalism is the idiots we call journalists these days. Maybe, if you content were worth paying for like it once was, you’d not have to resort to annoying ads that we feel compelled to block. Just food for thought…
Lazy journalism, and journalists who try to make the news instead of report the news, are a threat to the future of journalism.
Adblock + NoScript + a custom /etc/hosts on all devices are the future. OTOH, I pay for the websites that I believe bring value.
darknexus,
People are becoming less willing to pay for news, even as the quality is falling. For quite a while now professional journalists have been loosing their jobs as more and more people transition to amateur bloggers for their news & entertainment fix. It’s becoming the new norm.
How could we fix it? Is there any incentive to invest in high quality journalism these days? Advertisers, for their part, will go wherever the impressions & clicks are; the truth is a high quality periodical won’t necessarily yield more attention than a high traffic blog.
Edit: I guess we’re kind of saying the same thing.
Edited 2015-07-23 14:49 UTC
You have that backwards: As the quality is falling, people are becoming less willing to pay for the news.
Why should we put up with paid advertising and self-serving puff pieces that are passed off as “hard hitting journalism” these days? People get disgusted with the clear bias and advertising that “news” sites/networks/papers seem to think is okay to pass off as news.
JLF65,
Sure it’s a bit chicken and egg, but when you’ve even got Pulitzer prize winning journalists getting laid off, then yea we’ve got to face the fact that the economic struggles are real factor in the loss of professional journalism and not merely a byproduct of bad quality.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/business/media/27shot.html?_r=0
It’s more than just a few unfortunate cases, it’s happening everywhere. I find it much more likely that this is caused by economic pressures rather than a simultaneous drop in quality.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/newspaper-layoffs/
Edited 2015-07-23 21:14 UTC
There would be, if these news aggregators wouldn’t try so damn hard to remove as much control from end users as possible in regard to what they’re seeing. For example, give me an Android blog/news site that ONLY showed me articles about high-end phones/tablets that are released in the US, and I’d pay a monthly fee for that. I really don’t care about the 500 shitty $100 Android One phones or drugstore tablets that are released every week. Nor do I care about anything that gets released on Sprint …
I might be unique here, but I’m more against 3rd party ad brokers themselves (like google). I wouldn’t even consider whitelisting external ad-brokers because of the privacy implications. Ie. My right to privacy (from google and others) trumps the right to show me ads.
I’m not really as opposed to ads served directly by the sites I’m visiting, but google has all but killed more direct advertising/sponsorships – at least on small/medium websites that have difficulty attracting advertisers directly.
Does anyone remember the “Punch the monkey” ads and other similar, and extremely annoying garbage? Browsing the web used to be a visual, and sometimes audio assault. I imagine it’s not quite as bad now, but I honestly don’t know.
Ads are often more than an annoyance. Sometimes they are a real hindrance. I literally have a hard time reading a page of text if there is something animated next to it, whether it’s an ad or anything else.
Just like on TV, the typical ad is almost infinitely more likely to drive me away from the medium it is placed in than for me to ever buy anything.
I do wish it were easier to whitelist good ads, but they are so few and far between that it’s hardly worth the effort. If a site asks me nicely to disable the ad blocker, I’ll usually do it, but I don’t go out of my way.
I understand why advertising exists, and I’m not opposed to it in principle. For instance, I’m currently playing an ad-sponsored game on Android called “Tiny Warriors”, one of the infinitely many clones of the “match-3” puzzle games. It’s ad-driven. Every several levels, it will interrupt for a short video of another game to try. While the games seldom look interesting to me, it doesn’t bother me either. The amount of ads is reasonable, and they’re not distracting me during gameplay. I wish they would repeat less, but if they really bugged me, I would switch to another game.
Advertising can be done right, and you know, even in a way that might actually increase sales, but you need to respect your audience, not mug them. Look at the Superbowl. Nowadays, it’s known as much for the ads as the game itself, which is often not that exciting.
But if the companies relying on advertising can’t make their business plan work, as someone who blocks ads it’s not my fault nor my problem. I don’t mind paying a reasonable fee instead.
ConceptJunkie,
This is reasonable. I’m curious, anybody here paying for an osnews subscription?
It just seems that overall the set of those willing to pay for content is shrinking. The growth in new online markets is not even close to making up the losses in traditional markets.
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2013/newspapers-stabilizing-but-stil…
Also a separate issue is that both the price for online subscriptions as well as online advertising can be much less than traditional subscriptions, which compounds the losses.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/newspaper-revenue…
Personally I don’t really care about the “online games journalism” cited in this article, but insofar as professional investigative journalists and in-depth reporting goes, I think the losses are unfortunate since they do play important roles for society.
Edited 2015-07-23 18:04 UTC
I tend to view this in a different light.
Things eventually either get regulated by the government or via the private sector in one way or another. The *wild west* state of things rarely lasts.
If the government were in charge of the internet, you’d have to pay taxes to regulate it. The same as we do with police, food inspections, other regulatory bodies.
The internet is largely free of such regulation. So private bodies setup their own regulatory system to keep things organized. Spam filters, ad block…
You want your ads to get past Adblock, well then you have to pay Adblock and keep your ads reasonable.
Seems reasonable to me. Or at least less extortion/intrusive than a government body that would tax and regulate everyone.
Ditto… with citations:
http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
http://www.less-broken.com/blog/2011/11/why-ad-blocking-is-not-mora…
(The first link explains WHY ad blocking has reached the state it has by reference to biological signalling theory)
That’s why Project Wonderful is the only ad network I whitelist. I trust them not to track me (unlike Google), they’re primarily used by sites like webcomics which I’m actually potentially interested in, and, with a GIF animation blocker, their ads are 100% static and silent.
Other advertising which manages to slip through my HOSTS+uBlock+NoScript stack earns its provider an automatic place on my blacklist and possibly the site too if it wasn’t a simple case of “we host our own ads locally”.
If we’re honest, advertisements are a desperate and sleazy way to make money in the first place. ALMOST everyone exposed to any given ad wants nothing to do with it. And some significant portion of clicks are by accident, or by people who are manipulated into clicking boobs or monkeys or ELVIS LIVES and are ultimately disappointed by what they get.
The real solution is people donating money regularly to pay the wages of service-people they regularly enjoy. But how to get the best out of humanity is a greater cause than most are willing to tackle…
They stop tracking me.
The ads are static.
They don’t interfere with the reason I’m reading the site.
They are not packaged as site content!
Web sites don’t realize that people like me stop frequenting sites with obnoxious ads. If I find a site that has minimal ads that are static and not obnoxious, I’ll actually follow the ads links on occasion. Otherwise I make a point not to. If I really want to go I’ll find the advertiser elsewhere not giving the site the click through. Sorry but if you help make the net suck more I’ll help you go out of business.
The lack of distance between the tech press, and the industry they are supposed to report about is much more worrying.
In 2013, Valleywag asked journalists who went to the Google I/O conference whether they had accepted the free Chromebook Pixel that was handed out to everyone attending. Optionally, a loan agreement could be signed which would formally require the return of the device at a later date.
http://valleywag.gawker.com/which-journalists-accepted-free-laptops…
Guess what, not everybody who accepted a Chromebook Pixel signed the agreement, and many when asked evaded the question or outright refused to answer.
Instead of ad-block I prefer /etc/hosts blocking (e.g. http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/) and various per-country blocks on my servers, routers and desktops.
I mean, why? Either I want to support a site with content I enjoy, in which case ads does not bother me, or it’s a site with shitty content and I just don’t visit it.
Why? If they don’t bother you that is fine but other people see things differently.
I find them an annoying distraction which make reading content more difficult. In addition they are vector for malware.
quotes shoul’ve been around “journalism”
Either make sure your ads aren’t scams, or you ‘ll be AdBlocked.
I don’t want to see another Google Ad telling me “your phone has a virus!!111”
PS: For some reason, Google and other ad agencies think their job is done as long as the ad doesn’t contain malware. The ad itself can lead to whatever scam it wants, it’s all OK.
Edited 2015-07-24 13:40 UTC
Maybe this is more correct:
“Ads are ‘biggest existential threat’ to online journalism”
Getting no ads here at OSnews, even when I disable Adblock Edge. Reason being, that Ghostery identifies and blocks six trackers here.
BuySellAds
Cross Pixel Media
Google Adsense
Google analytics
Gravatar (Unblocked to view comenter avatars)
Mint
If you want people such as myself to view ads here, feed them unobtrusive, generic, venue based/site relevant, non tracking ads or lose these potential ad viewers.
No compromise.
Internet Ads are a genuine menace. They compromise your security, cost you resources (bandwidth, battery, cpu, money), take control of your system (even if just to show you something someone else wanted you to see), and are a major vector for malicious software. The fact we have to devote resources to run software (Ad Block, Antivirus) to prevent other software from running just to run the software we wanted to run in the first place is insane.
And journalism as a career is becoming obsolete. People share their experiences and interpretations online for free, frequent or trust ‘objective’ sources that don’t align with their politics less, and have more direct ways of observing the world around them than ever before to draw their own conclusions. We’ll always have historians and fact checking editors, but like contributing to open source, it’s not going to be the sort of thing that pays the bills.
So while I regret that journalism is ‘dying’, sacrificing the usability/security/reliability of my computing devices and giving some unknown/unreliable agent control over them is not something I’m willing to do to support it anymore.
Ad-blocking software is installed in the absolute minority of user machines. Linux has more desktop market share, than ad-blockers.
1
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Synapse)
Ad-blocking is not a threat to journalism. “Reporting” on useless garbage is what threatens journalism. A Kardashian becoming pregnant is not news. Taylor Swift twitter-arguing with Nicki Minaj is not news. Blake Shelton divorcing Miranda Lambert due to cheating is not news. This is all stuff I’ve seen from supposedly legitimate news sources lately.
Sensationalism is what threatens journalism. The attempt to keep people in a perpetual state of fear, shock, or anger through manipulation has ruined journalism. The cherry-picked sound bites. The lack of context. The flat out lies and/or wrong information being presented as facts.
Journalism is killing/has killed itself, not the lack of ad clicks.
Use your own bandwidth to serve the Javascript, images, flash, etc., maybe via a simple proxy.
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0.2; SAMSUNG SM-T707V 4G Build/LRX22G) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) SamsungBrowser/3.0 Chrome/38.0.2125.102 Safari/537.36