Where's the law that says I have to view web content as it's creators intend? You send me a stream of data, I decide what to do with it, what parts to render, what parts to ignore.
There's no law. I work at a newspaper. We are digitally aware and head towards a digital distribution. That means infrastructural changes and that costs money. Those advertisers pay the bills. They provide the means for us to reach you. Subscription models are (currently) not enough.
I'm not trying to guilt anyone into anything but this will be a an interesting field to watch in the coming years. How will journalism fund itself and maintain some semblance of integrity? If the ad revenues fall it will be a bumpy ride indeed.
In the December 2014 issue of Le Monde diplomatique there is an interesting article that investigates future possible press models within the French context: http://mondediplo.com/2014/12/13press (in English, but behind a pay wall). The authors argue that for public interest press (news, investigative journalism, etc), a shared publication and distribution institute/company should be funded by the government. In that way, the magazines/newspapers/whatever only have to finance the costs of the journalists and editors. Publication costs are carried by this joint/shared open publisher. The article is focussed on the French situation, and stresses that the government already hands out a yearly €1.6bn subsidy to the press, and end with concluding that funding a joint open publication institute will not be that much different money-wise compared to the current situation.
I agree that journalism is a public good. Having the government fund it sends shivers through my spine. Recently where I live the public broadcasting corp. was threatened with cutbacks due to a perceived slant in coverage. The threats were then carried out after the politician in question was given chairmanship of the parliamentary committee on the budget. That to me is so troublesome I don't consider it viable.
I guess this discussion is way off-topic at this point :-) But I find it interesting enough to keep it going. The real challenge is obviously to have this government funded publication company stay free of direct government interference. The article mentions a sort of tax that is levied before the wage is paid out, and should be delivered directly to the join publication house. Much in the same way as some European social security contributions are collected today. That would keep the funding away from the yearly government budgeting rounds.
No matter what system we think of, the powers at be will always try to influence the press and information. We can also see that in the current system, where large stakeholders can pressure/influence journalists and publications. I don't think the state has a monopoly here, on the contrary.
> How will journalism fund itself and maintain some semblance of integrity?
i suspect journalists can do that by asking for a larger subscription. If society truly values the work of journalists, instead of it being a conduit for advertising, then it will be paid accordingly. If not, then, yes, it's a shame, but it really means that nobody values the work of a true journalist (especially investigative journalism), and it will die out. But that's reality, as sad as it would be if it were to be true.
>> yes, it's a shame, but it really means that nobody values the work of a true journalist (especially investigative journalism)
> I find your fatalism disheartening.
It's not fatalism but rather a political statement.
OP argues from within the superficial logic of capitalist exchange: the value of a commodity is whether and for how much it sells.
Uninterestingly enough, the thing which the OP will not be sad to kill is investigative journalism, which is pretty much the only branch of intellectual work that can undo the corruption that is brought on by the above psychotic logic.
What you think is fatalism is actually poorly disguised pro-corruption propaganda.
I think conflating "viewing ads" with "fighting for good things" is going a little far. Grandparent isn't against people caring, and specifically mentioned the possibility of showing that via higher subscriptions.
So this is a slight digress, but while we're on the subject, how does an advertiser know that an ad has been successfully served or blocked? I've never had that part fully explained to me. If they're just basing it on number of adds clicks, I rather doubt whether I use an ad blocker or not makes much difference, because I can more or less guarantee that in the ~18 years I have actively surfed the web, the number of ad links I have consciously clicked is between 0 and 5.
So I assume, then, that they have some way of tracking whether the ad was presented to the end-user?
Ad servers keep track of the number of times the graphic (or other asset) for a particular campaign was served. Lots of other "pixels" also get bundled into the calls depending on what kinds of ad tech the advertiser, publisher, or middlemen are running.
How many people (living, breathing, checkbook-possessing people) actually see an ad is an entirely different question from how many it is served to, and there is (of course) a whole 'nother area of ad tech companies working in that space.
Not my expertise but to show an ad there is usually a request to the server to send the graphics or similar so I guess they could track if that happens. Not sure if they do in practice. Occasionally a website notices I have an adblocker and moans at me or warns that it may mess up the functionality.
Funding comes from 3 sources: Owners, advertisers and the public (either as donationware or subscription fees). Each one comes with a set of challenges.
Owners tend to exert some sort of editorial control, making the coverage slanted towards their end-goal.
Advertisers tend to be unpalatable to the reader, sometimes editorial control is a problem but that sometimes means there's an editorial problem (advertisers stop using a paper due to consumer pressure).
Subscription means your content is not as widely distributed as it could be. Yes we want to get paid but primarily journalists are in it to be read. Getting that many people to part with money is also a hard problem when compared to the other two sources.
It seems like if you're interested in making money online with advertising with "journalism" there's strong pressure to turn yourself into BuzzFeed.... that is, low effort, cheap tricks, information pornography.
No, I am genuinely interested in how to fund real journalism. How do we go about getting money for people to expose the aggregation of wealth and power against the interests of the plebeians. (note: plebeians is used here not as a derogatory)
To fund real journalism for the filthy peasants you need to seek public and private funding for an endowment (not direct operational funding) combined with a small amount of tasteful advertising and merchandising, subscription fees, and a policy of graduating content to public domain after a certain short period (a few months and not much more).
Merchandising could be prints of artwork, cartoons, expanded versions of articles or source materials as well as branded things like coffee mugs.
The key is being lean to start and developing an endowment so you don't always have to be seeking dollars (NPR fund drives bad). Offer high value, medium to high priced merchandise, keep your journalistic standards high with a low supply of advertising (keeping demand high).
Endowment contributors will be motivated by a history of quality journalism and the fact that you open your content to the public after a certain reasonably short time. If you give people a way to buy it without abusing DRM or being otherwise obnoxious, people will pay.
I'm not sure most of the people exposing the aggregation of wealth and power against the interests of the plebeians are doing it for the money and would probably do it even if unpaid. Though for what it's worth the main guy I read doing that, Krugman, get's paid pretty well by the NYT which makes money from subscriptions which works because some people are willing to pay.
For anyone unfamiliar with Krugman here's an example:
Hehe. Surely some DRM friendly folks dreamed about a personal computer platform where you would be forced to go through commercials as with television/video before accessing content.
Unfortunately, ad blocking has become a part of protection against malware -- especially for non-tech users.
Blame malvertising that loads exploit kits, and ads (on search engines and elsewhere with fake download buttons, etc) that point to pay-per-install malware, the kind of spyware/adware that's super easy to install and monitor-smashingly hard to remove, now the creators of those have gone as far as adding ring-3 rootkits to their dlls that hook into browsers.
That would be like saying a service that blacked out the ads in news papers is theft, its completely rubbish. Plus educate yourself on the definition of theft:
"theft is the taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it."
At best its unauthorized modification of a creative work without distributing it, which is not illegal and never will be.
Don't know why parent comment was killed when the article contains a similar assertion (the other way). While not a lot is gained by using loaded words like "theft", it is a simple fact that using ad blockers causes the owners of many of the sites that you visit to receive less revenue than they would otherwise. One can argue that one is perfectly justified in doing this (e.g. many typical examples of this are included below), but one can not truthfully say that they are not taking money away from the sites they visit. (Yes I know about PPC ads and how you never click them. Other than AdSense, the vast majority of advertising out there is sold on a CPM basis.)
That's present in uBlock too, despite some fairly unintuitive UI - the big green power icon isn't a full disable for the extension, it disables it for the current site only.
You could make a case that an ISP or proxy operator that replaces advertising with other advertising is stealing from the operator of the original website. But blocking ads is the same as not looking at ads in the paper. If you're not going to act on them or read them you might as well block them for the bandwidth savings and speed improvement. Besides that, not all advertising has your best interest at heart, there is quite a bit of malware that uses distribution via advertising networks as their vector onto your machine. So now adblocking has the perfect fig-leaf: it will keep malware of your machine. This makes adblocking mandatory within organizations if they're savvy about this, why take the risk of having to re-image a bunch of machines or allow a bunch of drive-by malware to gain a foothold behind your precious corporate firewall if you can simply block it at the source.
When are these ads being forced on you? When you willingly and knowingly visit content providers who make no secret of being supported by advertisements?
Often times, we land on a web page before knowing the history of the website or its funding model, privacy policy, terms of service, etc. This means that, upon visiting a new website for the very first time, consent to view advertising is not an informed decision, it's forced on us.
But aside from that, I've consented for the content provided by the content providers to execute in my browser. I did not extend the same consent to the ad agencies. If content providers wish to host the ad code, images, etc. on their own servers, then your argument starts to make sense. I would still argue that it's up to the content providers to publish whatever they see fit and it's my right as a consumer to control how the information they publish is assembled and presented to me on my machine. Not theirs.
If content providers were to host advertising materials on their own server, it would also make it harder to use ad networks for watering hole attacks and thus the internet would be more secure.
I use Privacy Badger, NoScript, and RequestPolicy to manage my browser's security, and EMET to help keep the rest of my system safe from the browser. I don't rely on AdBlock or any similar tools to achieve this.
I wonder if sites could make it so with EULA or something. Could they say that viewing an article without ads violates something? Or using this service (for example reddit) without ads? Is it legally possible?
the consideration is the content of the website. EULA haven't been tested in court, sure, but i think against the average person, they won't be able to do battle against a large corporation should they decide to enforce it.
Contract Consideration - Something of value given by both parties to a contract that induces them to enter into the agreement to exchange mutual performances.
