I no longer use Google Play and I block ads

General Discussions
#1

Hi

I want to avoid ruining the topic about IndyRush, I answer to NegativeZero’s post here.

Google Play isn’t available on all Android devices and it can’t be used without a Google account, that’s why I circumvent this “system”. I have never wanted to lack of respect for Corvid’s game or harm him, I don’t want to prevent him from promoting his work, I have never claimed that he deserves no income and I made some donations in the past to several developers.

I understand that some end users want to get everything for free but keep in mind that this forum is mostly visited by numerous developers (what I wrote here has a very low impact on his user base), it’s up to the developers to provide some alternative means of paying them (FlattR?) and I encourage people to remember that every work deserves a salary. In other words, I tell them to accept the ads or to pay when their use goes beyond a simple test. I don’t accept the ads but I pay, I’m not a thief. Some ads are extremely invasive, they can appear when you get a call or when you want to take a picture, people can have some legitimate reasons to block ads and a business model exclusively based on them is a weak one.

You can kill someone with a knife but the guy who made it isn’t responsible for its use. Some people can use my tricks to avoid paying even though a few bucks would be deserved but I’m not responsible for having them believe that they can get everything for free, I would rather point out lots of webmasters and service providers who have (ab)used ads for more than a decade instead of looking for a stronger business model.

This is a political problem, there is no purely technical solution on the long term. I don’t see the point of showing ads on which almost nobody will click. When the ad bubble explodes, the advertisers will have earned a lot of money in the meantime but those who depend a lot on ad revenues will be in a very bad situation. I will never accept forced ads and I think that there is a real need of looking for more viable business models for game programmers as a game isn’t a tomato, the digital economy is different.

#2

[quote]it’s up to the developers to provide some alternative means of paying them
[/quote]
I agree about this ad bubble and it exploding - I probably saw 5 in the last 20 minutes and cant remember a thing, trained to blank them out.

I disagree with what you said though, they shouldn’t have to imo.

I don’t want to jack your topic, but can I quickly ask (not developed for android and dont use a smartphone) what happens to in-app adds if you disable internet?

#3

They just don’t show up.

#4

Please can you elaborate? If the developers don’t provide alternative means of getting some money, I can’t pay them. Most of the time, I ask an IBAN. If I use Paypal, it will sell my personal data to Facebook. If I use a Google account, Google will do the same.

#5

Banks sell your financial information too…

#6

As do utility companies. Even the government drives statistical models off your personal data and then sell the results of that model.

Cheers,

Kev

#7

At the risk of hijacking this thread, we’ve got a bit of a paradox here:

We want less annoying, less obtrusive, more memorable, more applicable, just in general better advertisements. They are a necessary evil in our world, so we should make them as un-evil as possible.

However, the way to do this is by tailoring advertisements to specific types of people. The ads on this site promote games by the people on this site, for example, and that doesn’t seem half bad.

But, in theory, that’s what google/facebook/microsoft/amazon/everybody is doing when they “sell your information” as it is sorta misleadingly called. But we don’t like that either!

So, what’s the solution?

I like ad networks like Project Wonderful, who usually seem to show pretty decent advertisements (and they’re site-wide, not specific to a user), and hopefully the bigger ad networks get better at showing ads in a non-obtrusive way.

Is there a “good” way to do ads? Or are we all just waiting for the “ad bubble” to burst? What comes after that?

#8

The fact that some other organizations sell my personal data too doesn’t drive it more acceptable. Moreover, keep in mind that we live in different countries with different laws. Germany and France are known to have stricter laws about the use of personal data and there are historical reasons for that (several census and immunization campaigns had been used in the thirties to “file” the Jews). The CIA used vaccination campaigns for spying purposes too:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-no-more-vaccination-campaigns-in-spy-operations/2014/05/19/406c4f3e-df88-11e3-8dcc-d6b7fede081a_story.html
IBM technically helped in the filing (use a translator as this article is in French):
http://www.histoire-medecine.fr/articles-histoire-de-la-medecine-ibm-et-le-fichage-des-juifs-en-france.php

Personally, I want no ad.

I don’t look at the banners and they aren’t invasive.

I don’t use Microsoft products except when I’m forced to do so at work. I still try to stay far from Google, my next mobile phone won’t be under Android (Neo 900 under GNU Linux), I’ve already tried to migrate from Youtube to something else, I don’t use Google search engine, I don’t use Facebook, …

In my humble opinion, there is no acceptable ad. If I want to learn things about games, I have to go to a website about games, I have to look for information instead of getting annoying popups. I think that it will be difficult to explain to people that it’s time to pay but it’s necessary. I’m still in favour of the collectivist cooperative global patronage.

#9

Isn’t everything advertising? Isn’t making a thread about a game on JGO advertising? Or telling my colleagues at work about my game during a coffee break, or making a website for the game… What we despise as adverts are simply a formalized, commercialized and packaged way of doing the same thing as the JGO game thread, the coffee break banter, and the ever-hopeful website.

#10

I guess the difference lies in that the potential customer actively looks for the examples you mentioned, while the ads being discussed are brought to the customer’s attention even if the customer is not interested in them.

I feel this is an old debate (about the intrusiveness of advertising), I mean, before the internet there were TV or radio commercials, as well as paper-mail spam clogging mailboxes, not to mention all the adverts so get to see as you walk around town.
Heck, I sometimes hear a car rolling down the street blaring some advert from a loudspeaker!

#11

Then what’s the alternative? Having everybody pay for content?

I write tutorials and post them on my site, and I put up ads to hopefully eventually make some money from them- or at least cover the cost of hosting. My target audience are mostly teenagers who don’t have credit cards, and certainly don’t want to pay for content. But they don’t mind a couple banner ads here and there.

What do I do as a creator? I’m not trying to bicker, I honestly want to know what the better solution is.

The truth is, most people would rather see ads than pay. There is a point where the ads become too much and people would rather just not use the site at all, but sites like buzzfeed prove that the threshold for most people is pretty high.

#12

I only block ads whenever they lag the hell out of my browser.

While I would happily support the people delivering this content, get five Flash ads running on your webpage all at once and I’ll turn on AdBlock. :wink:

I still make exceptions for sites I know and support, but when it gets to the point where I can’t properly use your site without lagging up (and potentially crashing) my browser, I’m out.

  • Jev
#13

You pay or they pay. There is no ad on my blog because I pay Automattic, I ask nobody to cover the ridiculously small cost of hosting. There is no simple technical solution, people have to be educated anew so that they accept paying for the contents, directly or indirectly, with or without global license/global patronage/… I don’t say that it’s a simple problem to solve.

The success of Adblock (especially Trueblock and later Adblock Edge) shows that lots of people don’t want to see ads.

Moreover, some ads are used to track people, it gives me another reason to refuse them all.

#14

Exactly. You’re proposing that we change how every single person uses the internet. That would definitely be nice, but it ain’t gonna happen. Might as well try to make the best of a bad situation?

Okay, but the percentage of people on the internet using adblock is very small. Especially compared to the percentage of people on the internet who use sites like buzzfeed where the entire site is basically one big advertisement.

How do you get the vast majority of internet uses (who don’t mind ads) to switch over to a pay-for-content system?

Yes that’s creepy, but how should ads become more relevant without knowing anything about the people they’re advertising to?

#15

[quote=“kpars,post:12,topic:52645”]
That’s another point that I feel some ignore. Even if your audience tolerates the ads, having them decrease the performance of your site/game will, in the long run, tarnish its reputation.

In my case, at least, sites that completely surrender their layout to ads, resulting in a visually disgusting mess, are less pleasant to navigate, and will, in the long run, lose to sites that offer comparable content without the clutter.

It ends up being a balancing act, in my opinion, and as such there is no specific answer. Just keep in mind that if the audience feels wronged, their trust will be hard to earn back.

A personal example:

I’m becoming very tired of sites that abuse the layout to maximize ad revenue. How do they do it? By needlessly splitting content into several pages so more ads load. One popular way is to offer a picture gallery, and then have each picture load as a separate page so everything loads again.

The result is that I, as a user, will often refrain from clicking through, just because I feel used and it bothers me (and this is with sites I turn AdBlock off because I want to support).

I guess, in the end, it all boils down to what type of audience you want. There are those who will tolerate any kind of crap, and those who will value that you treat them with respect. What each type of audience means to your product, well, that’s up to you.

#16

I may get some flak for this opinion, but;
Who cares they’re tracking you? I mean seriously? Does it really matter? Aside from the “Evil” targeted advertising where they show products I might actually be interested in, I don’t see the problem. :wink:

As for ads in general, my opinion is simply if a content provider decides to put ads on their site, we as the user have absolutely no right what so ever for any reason period to block them. If we don’t like them, tough. Show them your lack of support by not using their service/product.

The internet isn’t free. Blocking ads is the same as piracy, you’re getting content and no one is paying for it. So if you don’t like the content enough to put up with their price (the ads) then don’t use it.

#17

I quite agree with you about tracking. I simply don’t care (much).

However… it absolutely is my right to pick and choose what I download onto my computer and if I choose to generally block ads, that’s my prerogative. In all honesty I can’t actually stand the paid-for-with-advertising model that the internet has somehow spawned and I hope it all turns to ratshit as soon as possible. Paywalls ftw.

Cas :slight_smile:

#18

Honestly I’d be totally ok with paywalls as well, although the price needs to be reasonable. I mean, I can’t go around paying $5/month for google, JGO, StackOverflow, or the other 14 billion websites I use. Simply can’t afford it.

What would be nice is if the entire internet (and it’s users) had a mindset shift; Quality non-malicious ads on all free websites, with a cheap pay wall option of say a buck a month to offset lost ad revenue. I mean, imagine if Riven made a buck a month from all of us. That’s a nice chunk 'o change.

Of course that model doesn’t work everywhere, for example sites that already have subscriptions like Academic Journals or high traffic/bandwidth need sites like Netflix and YouTube. But I would totally pay $10/month for an ad-free YouTube, and I already pay for Netflix. :stuck_out_tongue:

#19

Riven absolutely could make a buck a month off of many of us and I wonder why he doesn’t…

Cas :slight_smile:

#20

Quite frankly the Internet wouldn’t be where it is now without advertising. The early exponential growth was spurred by people building websites because they thought they could make a lot of money by putting up useless crap and plastering ads. Then the payout model changed but you could still use it since most people don’t mind ads as long as you don’t “break your site by putting 5 flash ads on one page.” Most advertising doesn’t bother me as long as it doesn’t get too obtrusive. If it does I just don’t visit the site with the bad ads. Putting everything behind paywalls won’t work either since the search engines can’t/won’t catalog behind paywalls. The whole point of the internet is to disseminate information and if you charge for it people won’t get it. Some people come up with models where they put out free content to draw users then sell a service they may need. Everyone can’t always do that so they put up ads. As far as I am concerned if you don’t want to look at ads don’t go to the site that is posting the content with ads, find it somewhere else or put up with it. People always want to get everything for free but everything is not free and if someone puts out something that is useful to me, my way of paying for it and thanking people for putting out information I find useful, is to put up with ads and even click on a few that are useful. If you can put up a site out of your own pocket and don’t try to make money off of it that is your prerogative but don’t force your ideals on other people. Especially if people need to make a little money to keep the site going. And don’t even say how cheap hosting is because even if it is cheap not everyone can still afford it.