Marcus Aurelius wrote:Except of course, it is true. Without ads there would much less free internet services and sites. If a very significant percentage of people would start to use adblockers, the effects would be felt very soon with some sites closing right away and others switching to subscription or micro-payment model, and of course many of the latter two closing later as insufficient funds would be raised through those methods. Adblockers are morally highly dubious, because using them is basically mooching.
I don't particularly give a damn, though. Ads are aggravting, intrusive, annoying, and they spend time blocking me from getting to the content I want to. Do
you see one of those aggrevating ads that scrolls up over half the screen you're trying to view and get a little burst of warmth from your gleeful consumerist heart that this little delay you're suffering got the guy who plugged it into his website some infitestimal amount of money? Or even worse, none at all because you of course don't care about buying whatever brand of toilet paper or feminine product they're trying to hock at you right now, and thus you didn't click it?
Admiral Valdemar wrote:This "dilemma", however, isn't new. It's no different to recording a show on a VCR and fast-forwarding through the ad-breaks. Personally, I have no qualms with telling the advertisers where to shove it. I'm not blind to where most sites get their revenue, but I also can't endorse rampant consumerism which has now made the use of an adblocker vital should you not want to go insane from product placement.
Most of the time it's not even product placement, just random targeted advertisement triggered by words that appear on a page, and not even
good product placement! Take this website for example, in N&P if they're talking about pretty much anything that any government does and the topic of regulation comes up, deregulation will come up, then people will start mocking Ayn Rand, and then the advert at the bottom of the page will
try to sell you an Ayn Rand Book!
(Now watch and see if it doesn't happen to
this thread. Let me see if I can feed that spider some more: John Galt, Who is John Galt?, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, objectivist, objectivism, The Fountainhead, For the New Intellectual. That oughta do it.)
And worse, if it's in a Flash game, it quite often takes the form of a TV advert that you have to sit through. What in the hell makes anyone think that anybody who wants to play
Tower Defense 55,051: The Defending From The Tower gives two shits about (already used TP and feminine hygene products) Husqvarna landscaping equipment? Ayn Rand. Or AARP auto insurance from the Hartford? (Wow, that targeted advert spider is going to have no fucking idea what the hell is going on in here. Ayn Rand.)
It's bad enough they want to force me to watch their damn advert, taking
my time to do so, but they aren't even offering me anything
remotely tangenital to my interests. I have no control over the brand of toilet tissue purchased in this household, and I am not sufficiently dissatisfied with the brand currently employed to make an issue of it. I am not (no matter what STARK and other EvE Online purists might say, (Ayn Rand)) a blubbering vagina, so I have no need of feminine hygene products. I am allergic to manual labor (James May: "That's not an allergy, that's bone idleness!" Ayn Rand,) and my uncle already owns plenty of power tools, so I have no need for Husqvarna equipment (Ayn Rand), or any other ridiculously not-even-remotely-tangenital schlock they're trying to hock on me.
None of which admittedly changes the fact that the developers of the flash game in question are trying to get some extra money with their adverts. The simple fact is, though, that I don't give enough of a shit to need the use of that Angel Soft toilet paper they keep trying to sell me. (Ayn Rand.) People made Flash games long before anyone got the idea of asking for money for their damn flash games. They will continue to do so for as long as Flash, as a medium, is around; if nothing else, it lets them hope a real developer sees their stuff and poaches them. They'll continue to do it because the websites themselves offer incentives to do so, and they
have started to try and move to a microtransaction model. I, and I'm sure most of us, immediately roll our eyes and close the window of a Flash game that's trying to tell us to pay them money to get
whatever bonus they want to hock onto us. I reserve unto myself the right to ignore adverts and to not have them intrude upon my browsing experience; just like in the years before effective adblockers, people's minds were mentally trained to ignore adverts. I, and everyone else who uses the adblock plugin, have gone one step further and had our computers actively disregard them.
It's no different from, as was said, fast-forwarding through recorded adverts.
Most sites wouldn't dare start a subscription for something that other, less struggling sites would offer. Just look at the reactions about News Corporation's charging for The Times Online. People will go elsewhere, and the majority of users aren't savvy enough to find a way to block these ads on the whole.
Exactly. Rupert Murdoch is a reality-disconnected dribbling cunt, and he's going to kil the Times Online (Ayn Rand) and his other brands by doing this, because CNN, the BBC; everybody else isn't going to follow suit. They're going to let the moron deprive himself of being seen, all the while laughing it up. The same will happen if, say, Newgrounds tries to go to a subscription scheme. I might,
might, pay a one-time fee for access to a clearinghouse like Newgrounds, but that's it. If they try to gouge people like
that, they'll just be very quickly rendered impotent.
Also, Ayn Rand.
Ads.
