Jimquisition: The Adblock Episode
- Thread starter Jimothy Sterling
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I'm not a fan of that either, but it's been deemed acceptable at some level. I think we charge a premium or something. :/WeepingAngels said:
Also for those curious, video ads pay something like 3 or 4 times the value of regular banners purely because they have more of a captive audience for longer form messages.
Also, as far as HTML5/mobile site, we literally haven't had the dev time to make it happen. HTML5 videos in particular didn't have real ad support until semi-recently. And even then, the embed format is so basic that stripping out ads from a playlist was easy enough to do manually (unless the ad is baked into the video file directly, which makes it obnoxious to track/rotate/encode multiple formats without overpaying for some fancy video host or throwing more encoding hardware then we have at it. Never mind the inane "tracking" issues the advertisers impose to count impressions via a third party.)
So we enabled HTML5 on PubClub where that concern doesn't exist. One day we'll have a mobile site. One day we might have more then 1.5 web programmers as well...
I use a scriptblocker but not for the express purpose of blocking ads, that's more of a side-effect. I use it to guard my computer against malicious code in this digital wild west we call the internet. I've never really thought that AdBlock was something I needed, and always thought Firefox's NoScript was much better.
That said, using it has consequences both ways. It doesn't always make your life easier, because you have to whitelist quite a LOT of sites in order to make use of them properly. I still think it'd worth the extra work to get the additional protection because, frankly, I don't trust ANY site to be 100% clean. They can take all the precautions they like and tell me how safe it all is, but I didn't go 10+ years virus-free because of my trusting nature.
Sites get hacked. All. The. Time. The massive amounts cross-linkage and remote host accessing that're going on right now is pure heaven for makers of malicious code. I want each and every site I let my computer grant access to to properly identify themselves and their intentions before I even consider letting them run their code.
So, that's why I use a ScriptBlocker.
I've whitelisted The Escapist though, obviously. I read your stuff all the time, so it's only fair.
That said, using it has consequences both ways. It doesn't always make your life easier, because you have to whitelist quite a LOT of sites in order to make use of them properly. I still think it'd worth the extra work to get the additional protection because, frankly, I don't trust ANY site to be 100% clean. They can take all the precautions they like and tell me how safe it all is, but I didn't go 10+ years virus-free because of my trusting nature.
Sites get hacked. All. The. Time. The massive amounts cross-linkage and remote host accessing that're going on right now is pure heaven for makers of malicious code. I want each and every site I let my computer grant access to to properly identify themselves and their intentions before I even consider letting them run their code.
So, that's why I use a ScriptBlocker.
I've whitelisted The Escapist though, obviously. I read your stuff all the time, so it's only fair.
We're letting people discuss it, which is forbidden in the CoC. So this is an exception. People discussing it just need to not admit to using it on this site or advocate its usage. The majority of people in this thread have not received any wrath, which is just proof that you can discuss it without breaking the rules.Scrumpmonkey said:
We haven't suspended anyone for simply talking about it. Admission and advocating is another matter, and I've said before and I'll say again that you can have a conversation about it without either of them.
Going back years now I decided that the content on "The Escapist" (for all my criticisms) was worth supporting so I subscribed to "The Publisher's Club" (and just fine tuned my payment options so my renewal will happen on schedule next month, barring some unforeseen problem). As a result I don't really have any ad problems or need to ad block this site.
That said, I generally find ads to be incredibly annoying in many cases, I realize people need to make money, but at the same time if I'm grappling with pop up windows that block my reading until I click on them to shut them off (or wait for a timer to expire), or listen to some repetitive voice clip, or whatever, yeah I'm going to ad block. For the most part though if the ads are tasteful, I'll just let them go, and to be honest some of the ads have actually gotten me to check them out. While almost universally every "Free to play" MMO I've checked out via a site related ad has been truly terrible (which has kept me pretty much committed to the couple of games I do play, namely Cryptic's stuff), they still got me to at least look at them and see if their product (which always amounts to a cash shop) was worthwhile.
I think a lot of the problem is a lack of common sense among advertisers, but also that the sites looking for funding in some cases tend to be indiscriminate in who they allow to advertise and how, going with whatever is the best deal for them at the moment, or just selling space to a firm without much in the way of specification on what they will do for it. In some cases webmasters have seemed genuinely ignorant of what kinds of ads were running on their site, and apparently even had to go running to ask their sponsors to change something if a pop up or whatever was preventing the site from being used properly. For the most part if your ads are tasteful and don't load people with tracking/marketing cookies (or try to) or detract from the core experience of the site there isn't an issue.
As I haven't seen much of The Escapist's advertising (for reasons I just explained) I can't say much about it one way or another, so please don't engage in any projection here, I'm speaking entirely in a general sense.
What's more I think advertisers need to understand that a failure to generate sales and/or traffic is not generally because they have not gotten attention, or been obnoxious enough, it's because people might genuinely not be all that interested in their product, which means that if you move from say a small box on the corner of a web page, to a giant pop up that literally screams looping audio in your face and can't be shut off for a full minute, your achieving nothing except making people go from being not interested in your product, to actively hating you, and if your part of a general ad service letting your customers post things like this through your service, it's your own bloody fault when people decide to block you in general. In short (and redundant with what's said above) I think it all comes down to standards, the entire "Ad Block" problem is something of advertisers own creation, they are supposed to win people over and get a positive reaction, yet they have turned it into some kind of war which I don't think they even know how to fight, by actively alienating the people they are supposed to be trying to impress. Adblock wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for advertisers taking things way too far.
That said, by all means if you like someone's stuff, don't just endure the ads, perhaps select a few, try a FTP game, maybe by a T-shirt or something once in a while. Jim is right in saying that guys like him need to good will of advertisers to stay in business while they do this kind of thing.
I'll also say that Jim might deserve the title of "bravest dude in the multiverse" added to his already impressive resume... to be honest I probably wouldn't be brave enough to publically put up a PO box like that while running a
show like this one. After a while I'd be afraid to open it, scared that something worse than dildos would be in there....
That said, I generally find ads to be incredibly annoying in many cases, I realize people need to make money, but at the same time if I'm grappling with pop up windows that block my reading until I click on them to shut them off (or wait for a timer to expire), or listen to some repetitive voice clip, or whatever, yeah I'm going to ad block. For the most part though if the ads are tasteful, I'll just let them go, and to be honest some of the ads have actually gotten me to check them out. While almost universally every "Free to play" MMO I've checked out via a site related ad has been truly terrible (which has kept me pretty much committed to the couple of games I do play, namely Cryptic's stuff), they still got me to at least look at them and see if their product (which always amounts to a cash shop) was worthwhile.
I think a lot of the problem is a lack of common sense among advertisers, but also that the sites looking for funding in some cases tend to be indiscriminate in who they allow to advertise and how, going with whatever is the best deal for them at the moment, or just selling space to a firm without much in the way of specification on what they will do for it. In some cases webmasters have seemed genuinely ignorant of what kinds of ads were running on their site, and apparently even had to go running to ask their sponsors to change something if a pop up or whatever was preventing the site from being used properly. For the most part if your ads are tasteful and don't load people with tracking/marketing cookies (or try to) or detract from the core experience of the site there isn't an issue.
As I haven't seen much of The Escapist's advertising (for reasons I just explained) I can't say much about it one way or another, so please don't engage in any projection here, I'm speaking entirely in a general sense.
What's more I think advertisers need to understand that a failure to generate sales and/or traffic is not generally because they have not gotten attention, or been obnoxious enough, it's because people might genuinely not be all that interested in their product, which means that if you move from say a small box on the corner of a web page, to a giant pop up that literally screams looping audio in your face and can't be shut off for a full minute, your achieving nothing except making people go from being not interested in your product, to actively hating you, and if your part of a general ad service letting your customers post things like this through your service, it's your own bloody fault when people decide to block you in general. In short (and redundant with what's said above) I think it all comes down to standards, the entire "Ad Block" problem is something of advertisers own creation, they are supposed to win people over and get a positive reaction, yet they have turned it into some kind of war which I don't think they even know how to fight, by actively alienating the people they are supposed to be trying to impress. Adblock wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for advertisers taking things way too far.
That said, by all means if you like someone's stuff, don't just endure the ads, perhaps select a few, try a FTP game, maybe by a T-shirt or something once in a while. Jim is right in saying that guys like him need to good will of advertisers to stay in business while they do this kind of thing.
I'll also say that Jim might deserve the title of "bravest dude in the multiverse" added to his already impressive resume... to be honest I probably wouldn't be brave enough to publically put up a PO box like that while running a
show like this one. After a while I'd be afraid to open it, scared that something worse than dildos would be in there....
I forgot about this point, but have heard it made several times as well.Marter said:
It's also related to some of the reasons we ban piracy discussions (other then not wanting to talk about illegal things and deal with lawyering more then we have to), it scares away developers from wanting to associate with us.
Like you, Jim, I wouldn't dream of surfing the internet without proper protection. That said, can we get a list of all the third parties we need to whitelist in order for the advertisements to work? Standard operating procedure is to block everything except what proves necessary in order to get the content to display.Jimothy Sterling said:
Do you have a list of all the web domains or IPs I would need to whitelist in order to get the Escapist's ads to display properly? For some reason, when I've asked for this information in the past, companies have seemed reluctant to share it. Instead they say insane things like "whitelist everything and disable all your security software." One time a website even went so far as to suggest I disable my virus-scanner!
But since you "get it," and you're a respected staff member at The Escapist, I am wondering if just maybe you have that magical combination of intelligence and authority required to get anything accomplished that is so rare in our modern world.
This is my promise to you: If you tell me a list of the bare minimum I need to unblock in order to support you, I will unblock them.
Just popping on to mention that I've paid for the Escapist subscription service. For the sheer amount of awesome video content they provide, I'm just fine paying $20/year to enjoy it without ads and with knowing that I'm supporting something I really enjoy. I even try to get all my gaming news off the site.Jimothy Sterling said:
Whee!
I do what I do for the Channel Awesomes videos, for you and Yahtzee and anyone else I occasionally watch on here.
I watch em. Blacklisted in my [sub]schadblock[/sub], when I'm truly invested, and/or using them to help me work.
And then I run em again, whitelisted afterwards. MOSTLY ONLY ON THE VIDEOS. Front page?
I watch em. Blacklisted in my [sub]schadblock[/sub], when I'm truly invested, and/or using them to help me work.
And then I run em again, whitelisted afterwards. MOSTLY ONLY ON THE VIDEOS. Front page?
...I'm sorry.
The escapist sadly kinda did push me towards my use of it, I was getting popup ads, loud ad's and god knows what else. I nearly left the site entirely. Adblock is what KEPT me on The Escapist.
I am a UK user, so they might not be revealing what we see to you in the US. But there was some horrendously obnoxious advertising all over the front page, covering the article titles, burying half a page in I'm fairly sure, illegal services.
I was horrified, it wasn't the website I'd joined anymore.
I am a serial black/white lister. I know ad revenue is important to my entertainers so I try to be fair and give them their due, but when I'm sitting down working and watching something only to hear obnoxious flash jingle and that horrible raunchy 'hi there' shit from obvious ponography websites advertising? ...I'm turning it on.
I leave the white listed videos running while I'm on a break or out.
And have you seen the amount of adware shit pull off my computer after a session of white listing? It's fucking illegal.
I'd love a subscription. REALLY I'd love to have that spare money floating around, but Deviantart has first dibs on my money, and my need for it there is greater than here.
The escapist sadly kinda did push me towards my use of it, I was getting popup ads, loud ad's and god knows what else. I nearly left the site entirely. Adblock is what KEPT me on The Escapist.
I am a UK user, so they might not be revealing what we see to you in the US. But there was some horrendously obnoxious advertising all over the front page, covering the article titles, burying half a page in I'm fairly sure, illegal services.
I was horrified, it wasn't the website I'd joined anymore.
I am a serial black/white lister. I know ad revenue is important to my entertainers so I try to be fair and give them their due, but when I'm sitting down working and watching something only to hear obnoxious flash jingle and that horrible raunchy 'hi there' shit from obvious ponography websites advertising? ...I'm turning it on.
I leave the white listed videos running while I'm on a break or out.
And have you seen the amount of adware shit pull off my computer after a session of white listing? It's fucking illegal.
I'd love a subscription. REALLY I'd love to have that spare money floating around, but Deviantart has first dibs on my money, and my need for it there is greater than here.
This presumes that people admitting to using ad blockers in forums will have any significant effect on other people using ad blockers. This seems unlikely, as most people around here would already know they exist. 100% of people in this thread obviously know they exist.Also, banning users doesn't solve the problem - said users can still "leech" resources from your site and use Adblock, even if they don't have an Escapist account.Kross said:
Frankly, this "leeching" idea shows a lot of naivety about how the internet works. On the internet net, my browser makes a request to your site. Your site then chooses to deliver it or not. If you don't want people to have it, then put it behind a pass-word protected firewall or something. Your content is publicly available. You can't make the content publicly available but then also expect people to load everything on the page.
If having a random poster make a comment on low-traffic forums affects advertising, then surely having one of your most-viewed video creators do an entire episode on it is going to have a much larger effect?Kross said:
Also, I don't believe this for a second. Do you really think that advertisers read what is said in these forums and offer lower prices for ads because of it? That doesn't make any sense. Advertisers already get numbers on how many ad views you generate, and Ad Block is already accounted for in those figures.
Added:
There are tons of Facebook comments admitting to and advocating Adblock. These comments are published on the same page as the main article - and they are not being removed or censored.
So, how are we to believe that some forum comments admitting to Adblock use that are buried in low-traffic forums, are supped to have more influence on advertisers than the Facebook comments that you proudly display on the main page?
I will concede (please don't kill me mods) I did use ad-block on the Escapist (past tense), but seeing as how you are being so up front about it, I'm nixing it for the Escapist. I mainly had it because our old internet connection was INCREDIBLY slow, so trying to watch a video after an ad loaded took almost my whole lunch break, and their were full page ads (for the Xbox One) that I couldn't minimize or close so I couldn't look at anything on the Escapist for a few months. I had to resort to IGN and Kotaku!
But proudly swinging it around like a club is just something I cannot fathom, Ad-block is one of those things where it's very easy to not see the ramifications of doing do, like recycling. May the mods have mercy upon my soul.
But proudly swinging it around like a club is just something I cannot fathom, Ad-block is one of those things where it's very easy to not see the ramifications of doing do, like recycling. May the mods have mercy upon my soul.
I don't believe Jim did damage the site's image in the mind of advertisers. He advocated the whitelisting of this site. Not blocking it. His criticisms were similar to what he often says about game developers, and if you've noticed, that hasn't really hurt that end of the spectrum. He offered suggestions on how to improve and offered alternatives (subscriptions).Scrumpmonkey said:
I really liked the tone of this episode. Jim has a very reasonable stance on this issue, which I can understand and appreciate. Thank God for Jim.
This reminds me of a news story I read a few years ago regarding the Brazillian city of Sao Paulo. Back in around 2006/2007, a law was passed in Sao Paulo which banned outdoor advertisement and billboards. According to BBC News, the then-mayor of Sao Paulo, Gilberto Kassab, called the incessant advertising "visual pollution". While web pages and city streets aren't really the same thing, and I totally get that people need to run ads on their content, I don't think it's without merit to think of advertising with those terms, especially if it gets intrusive, or even if it's just passive. Advertisements are meant to be eye-catching and are supposed to draw your attention to them. They clutter webpages and draw your attention in a dozen different directions, whether you try to avoid acknowledging them or not. Even text ads clutter web pages, and are, in a way, just as bad as picture ads because they're harder to distinguish from the content on the page itself, though they aren't as intrusive. I will tell you that I have, in the past, browsed the internet on a computer that had adblock installed. I can say with absolute certainty that browsing with adblock is a very significantly more pleasant experience, free from all of the "visual pollution" of advertising trying to pull me away from what I'm there to do. It's not even like I don't have time to skip 10-30 second ads at the beginning of videos; it's much, much more than that. While I do understand that content creators need to run ads on their material, I think it's interesting to consider how the internet is a more pleasant experience without ads, as well as how much more pleasant and for what reasons. At this point, ads are, for lack of a better term, necessary evils if we want people who create their content for free to stick around, and, obviously, we really do want them to stay.
This reminds me of a news story I read a few years ago regarding the Brazillian city of Sao Paulo. Back in around 2006/2007, a law was passed in Sao Paulo which banned outdoor advertisement and billboards. According to BBC News, the then-mayor of Sao Paulo, Gilberto Kassab, called the incessant advertising "visual pollution". While web pages and city streets aren't really the same thing, and I totally get that people need to run ads on their content, I don't think it's without merit to think of advertising with those terms, especially if it gets intrusive, or even if it's just passive. Advertisements are meant to be eye-catching and are supposed to draw your attention to them. They clutter webpages and draw your attention in a dozen different directions, whether you try to avoid acknowledging them or not. Even text ads clutter web pages, and are, in a way, just as bad as picture ads because they're harder to distinguish from the content on the page itself, though they aren't as intrusive. I will tell you that I have, in the past, browsed the internet on a computer that had adblock installed. I can say with absolute certainty that browsing with adblock is a very significantly more pleasant experience, free from all of the "visual pollution" of advertising trying to pull me away from what I'm there to do. It's not even like I don't have time to skip 10-30 second ads at the beginning of videos; it's much, much more than that. While I do understand that content creators need to run ads on their material, I think it's interesting to consider how the internet is a more pleasant experience without ads, as well as how much more pleasant and for what reasons. At this point, ads are, for lack of a better term, necessary evils if we want people who create their content for free to stick around, and, obviously, we really do want them to stay.
Don't use adblock myself. 95% of advertisements I run across don't really bother me. 15 to 30 seconds of my life at the beginning of a video is more than adequate compensation for getting quality content on the internet, which is otherwise free to me.
I'm not saying that NO ads bother me (there have been a few on this site in the past that absolutely got on my tits for awhile), but at the end of the day, it's worth it to support talented people like Mr. Sterling here.
I'm not saying that NO ads bother me (there have been a few on this site in the past that absolutely got on my tits for awhile), but at the end of the day, it's worth it to support talented people like Mr. Sterling here.
I do feel warning people is antithetical to any proper discussion here. A major part of the video is how disabling adblock is directly against the interests of the consumer and how that makes the situation really difficult and complex.
The intent is the important part of the discussion here, and the personal experiences many of the warned people gave aren't entirely irrelevant to it as it gives anecdotal examples of why this is true. It changes adblockers from "haha I'm blocking your ads because I hate you" to "I'm not willing to put up with X to support your content and it's nothing against you personally".
Now you may not necessarily agree with this view, but if you view adblockers as a problem it's certainly important to recognize why people do it as to give rise to actual solutions instead of the defeatist attitude of locking it into a closet and pretending it doesn't exist.
The intent is the important part of the discussion here, and the personal experiences many of the warned people gave aren't entirely irrelevant to it as it gives anecdotal examples of why this is true. It changes adblockers from "haha I'm blocking your ads because I hate you" to "I'm not willing to put up with X to support your content and it's nothing against you personally".
Now you may not necessarily agree with this view, but if you view adblockers as a problem it's certainly important to recognize why people do it as to give rise to actual solutions instead of the defeatist attitude of locking it into a closet and pretending it doesn't exist.
I don't Ad-block the escapist, or any other site I visit regularly, YouTube, Twitch etcetera. I just checked out my white list and there are 12 sites I have completely white listed. Those 12 sites easily make up 70% of my dialy browsing. The only site I use daily that I Ad-block is Facebook, because well Facebook ads.