Ad blockers are a useful technology for users who opt in. For Safari, we aim to have on-by-default protections that provide privacy protection while still supporting ad-based business models. We see Firefox and Edge moving in this direction as well. We think that's the right balance for users, though, of course, our content blocker model also provides a sweet way of building ad blockers.
> We know there are users who want this because loads of people complain about paywalls.
That's a false dichotomy. "Users don't like paywalls, so they must like ads"...no, users don't like paywalls and also don't like ads.
(We can skip the whole "then how will content be paid for" argument that's been had thousands of times. There are plenty of solutions that aren't paywalls or ads.)
What solutions are you talking about? Premium subscriptions / donations like Ars Technica and the Guardian use? Those are the only major online publishers I can think of that aren't monetizing via ads, paywalls, or both.
I love paywalls to be honest. It gives me a taste of the quality of content to see if its worth my dollar a week. NYT also stopped hemmoragging cash by switching to a paywall subscription model, because just like since the dawn of printed content, people are generally fine with paying a tiny amount of cash to read something that’s not pure ad copy.
Well, yes, this new scheme would certainly not get me to stop using NoScript (I don't use an ad-blocker specifically as I don't object to ads. I do use NoScript, though, partly because I object to ads that run code on my machine).
My comment was about the two approaches in the absence of client-side defenses.
There's a fallacy in your argument, but I don't know what it's called.
Just because we got here via ads, doesn't mean we couldn't have gotten here without them. And that's even assuming that where we currently are is an optimum state we should shoot for.
Furthermore, it misses that we might be somewhere better than here had we not had ads. (I'm not saying it's a foregone conclusion, just one of many possibilities not mentioned.)
It's fun to think about how it could have all been different. No more sites designed to game search result rankings, designed to waste your time to maximize eyeballs on ads, designed to keep you on the site in a garden instead of surfing the web.
ISPs should have bundled hosting with internet access. Give everyone the possibility to generate their own site. It would be like a large insurance pool where your monthly bill might subsidize the costs of hosting another user who's site gets millions of views, just like how your monthly insurance premium ultimately covers the salary of someone else's surgeon, nurses, anesthesiologists, and keeping the lights on in the operating room. You can still ask for donations or even paid subscriptions if you wanted a well off full time staff.
Instead, we leaned on advertisers to fund our websites, middle men working tirelessly to come up with new ways to extract comfortable profit out of the system. Leeching resources that could have otherwise gone straight to the publisher had we designed the internet to be a little more federalized, a little more universal, with the costs shared among the users of the internet who are already paying for access anyway.
> Because quite a lot of the Internet couldn't exist in its current state without ads.
Let's not underestimate people's creativity. Let's kill ads completely, and see what creative solutions emerge.
After people realize that ads no longer work, I look forward to seeing what happens when they take several giant steps away from adtech and start building real alternatives.
> Because quite a lot of the Internet couldn't exist in its current state without ads.
This isn't a terribly meaningful statement, though. Just because the ad industry managed to dominate the web doesn't mean it had to be that way or that there are no other ways.
Also, in my opinion, advertising is doing more harm than good in the web overall.
Probably for the best. Id like an internet free of ads. Oh, I have that already thanks to ad-blocking technology. This is more user hostile crap, get it off my internet!
Otoh: ads do serve a purpose. Lots of ads equals low quality content in my experience. The more aggressive the ads, the worse the content. It's like websites are self-reporting their spamminess.
Some places get so strapped for cash that their content isn't even content, but thinly veiled low effort ad copy. I hardly trust online review articles anymore because they mostly focus on one new product by itself vs. in the context of a field of existing alternatives and are rarely critical these days.
Yeah, it's less and less "use ads to support the content creation", it's "write content to fill the void between the ads".
And yes, review articles are a similar problem. And another indicator: if the site has "stars" in the serps, i.e. provides "aggregate rating" as microdata, it's probably shit.
