The whole thing is a solid read, but two things worth quoting:
You may find sites that don’t load correctly with a content blocker in action. If so, you can reload any site without it. In Safari, all you need to do is tap and hold the reload button in the toolbar. When you do so, a menu displays asking if you want to request the desktop site, instead of the mobile site, or if you want to reload that site worth content blockers.
Good to know. And:
It’s a shame we had to get to this point. I make my living from writing, much of which is published on ad-supported websites. And I have ads on this site. So I would rather that the sleazy ad networks hadn’t killed the web, but they have.
Not sure they’ve killed the web, but they’ve certainly created the market for content blockers. And, I suspect, that will definitely change the web, at least the web’s advertising model.
Yeah, “the web” isn’t going anywhere. Funny that he even sees it that way, but I guess Upton Sinclair was right about “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
I had to allow disqus through Ghostery to leave this comment. Interesting that it has a “click to allow” UI for this content and not other types of content. It was, however, nice to not load all of the comments unless I wanted to see them.
Blocking comments is simply about throughput. So it’s nice to increase throughput. Ads affect sites, and I hope at some point we have a system where I can ‘trust’ a friend, and their recommendations for whitelists come through to my side, and I can then up/downvote, and we crowd source what is acceptable to us. That feedback could then be used by advertisers to become better netizens.
It is not only about throughput. That would be true, if the comment section is operated by the same site / entity. But since many pages use the same forum software, and most people use some “remember me” function for convenience, this is also another form of tracking. An highly effective one even, as commenting on something certainly proves a higher interest in a topic than just looking at random ads involuntarily…
I work in the publishing business. The web was a dream to advertisers to know more about the readership than the surveys done by publishers. But I think advertisers are picking up information up dubious value (e.g. click throughs) and are not getting the answer to the most important question: “Does this advertising campaign increase sales?”.
Seeing targeted ads for washer and dryers after I bought one does not help the advertisers.
Meanwhile us readers are being asked to expose our devices to malware, pay for the bandwidth these ads want, get crappy performance and lose lots of privacy. I’m not anti-ad but until ads use less of my resources I will block them.
Looking at the print publishing world, the readers of publications with paid subscriptions are generally more valuable to advertisers than the fee publications, even controlled circulation pubs. So how valuable are the readers of free web sites?
I think we have a lot more to learn what is going to make a successful web site.
But not necessarily useful one, since, in this case for instance, while Disqus or whomever they sell their metrics to, would know that I have “a higher interest” in ad-blockers, they wouldn’t, without reading my comment, know whether I liked them, disliked them, or thought the whole thing was pointless.