Is Ad blocking the next legal battleground? (opens in new tab)

This seems much the same as the music industry (Well, the RIAA crowd at least) wanting to sell a product that is, by its very nature, easy to copy and transfer.

For a relatively brief period there was an opportunity to sell prerecorded music in way that was coupled to a physical medium. When cassette tapes and home recording came along there were still enough impediments (degrades sound, time involved even if you used high-speed transfers, still needing to move around a physical item) that this particular business model was still viable.

Now, however, technology is such that offering an mp3 is much like serving a Web page. You'd like to believe the end user will use this or that rendering tool in a very constrained and predictable manner, but you really have no control over it.

Rather than accept that this business model is, by the nature of the product offered, more or less doomed, some music business people felt entitled to continue it. They turn to the legal system to try to control what users can do.

They are failing, over and over, but they can't seem to grasp that their cherish business model's time has come and gone. Their sense of entitlement is too strong.

Instead, the exhort users not treat their digital files as, well, digital files. They tell them there will be no more music if people copy and share. The tell them digital restriction management is really for their own good.

Yet some people are making money from their music. The successful ones are those who understand the technology and what people will use it for, understand how, when, and where people value music, and work with it rather than fight it.

People making money from ads on their blogs may be over-estimating the true value of their sites.

There are many people who download music they can find for free, but if they were forced to pay they would do without because it just isn't all that important to them. Likewise with Web sites. I read many sites, but there are few I would pay for. If a site owner cannot find another way to monetize a site (subscriber-only, or republishing and selling collected content as a PDF), maybe it's because there's insufficient value for the readers. No one is entitled to their cherished business models.

I don't think there really is an alternative because it doesn't matter.

I don't look at ads. I 100% ignore the adwords results on Google or the featured ads. After spending years using the internet it's gotten to the point where I don't even see ads anymore without ad-block unless they are injected video ads.

I use ad-block for the purpose of saving myself time. Having to deal with a 10 or 30 second ad into almost every short video is ridiculous. It's not like everyone watches these ads. Most of the time prior to using ad-block I instantly switched to a different tab.

Ads kill the internet. I've had some sites serve certain annoying ads in the past. If a site plays an ad that plays sounds, guess what? Even if you couldn't control what ad you served I'm never going to visit your site ever again, no matter what.

A real alternative would be to produce something of value. Give me a good product, service or content and I'll consider paying you for it. Spend less time trying to force people into buying stuff they probably don't want.

Ad blocking is an arms race. The more ad revenue that's lost to ad blockers, the harder the ad networks will work to make their ads unblockable. (Startup idea: a combination ad network / cdn, so that ad blockers can't block the ads from your site without also blocking your graphics/css/js.) Eventually ad blocking becomes AI-complete.

Thing is, if we're blocking adverts, you could argue we're not the people you want to be targeting in the first place.

If the ads weren't awful, people wouldn't block them.

Micropayment networks like flattr and gittip might work, if they could build social momentum like tipping a waitress.

A web site cannot make any promises about what happens on some arbitrary client. Insisting that a site owner be responsible for what happens in a browser is like advertisers insisting from broadcasters that nobody talks or turns down the sound on a TV or radio when an ad is played. (I am aware that at least one Hollywoodroid has accused people of theft when they leave the room during TV commercial breaks. Even he did not put the blame on broadcasters.)

There may be some contract between a site user and site owner regarding the manipulation of served content and how it is rendered, but so far I've yet to see a site that makes me agree to not use any ad-blocking tools.

Worst I've seen is one or another site that detects when certain ad blockers are active and then blocks content.

OTOH, given some some legal issues and decisions regarding the peculiar notion of "deep linking" I fear that the people making laws do not actually understand how the Internet and Web technologies work.

Yeah?

You just made the conscious decision to use the paid property they purchased (bandwidth) to deliver you content that came at some expense. If the content is worth your time, the only revenue model available to sustain the content is not?

Self-entitled madness.

> Advertising ruins every communication medium

Bull.

Without the revenue of advertising, you'd not have the live broadcast of the activities of Apollo 11 on the moon.

I could cite dozens (if not thousands) of important events of which the public was made aware because advertising sustained news papers, radio, TV, and the Internet.

Self-entitled madness.

I agree ... though not for any of the reasons stated (so far). I'm paying for my bandwidth and the current trend is that bandwidth may become metered. No one can therefore force me to provide them with bandwidth to advertise to me. It seems to me that it's analogous to the fact that telemarketers aren't allowed to call my cell phone.

> And what about the blind guy who uses Lynx to surf? Or the non-blind guy?

Men of straw need not apply.

What about the struggling blogger (Brand Friedman?) unable to sustain his important and vital efforts on donations alone, who must turn to ads in order to eek out some revenue in order to continue?