I agree with most of this, or at least the sentiment of it.
I get that I should care about how I’m being tracked. I understand the concerns with privacy and the ability to opt out (or opt in). I understand the need for more transparency with who is tracking what, why, what kind of data, etc.
However, I also can’t really take seriously the people yelling “facebook is selling our personal information to private companies!” because, uh, they don’t understand how advertising works. (Note: I am not a facebook expert and maybe facebook is indeed doing nefarious things, but it ain’t the things most people are complaining about.)
I also don’t use ad block, mostly for the reasons you outlined- if I’m getting something out of using a site, the least I can do is allow their ads. I also stand by the inverse: if a site has intrusive ads or click-bait tactics, I refuse to use that site.
But I also look forward to a future where we have all of this figured out: maybe there is an alternative to the ad-based model. Maybe as costs go down and the number of people on the internet go up, the relationship between creators and viewers will mature. Or maybe not, and the vast majority of internet uses will stay in the walled gardens of facebook, google, etc. I don’t know- but I’m curious to see where it all goes.
Let’s assume I’m rather full of myself, and consider everybody that gave me 2 or more medals since joining JGO, an active member that is among the target audience in my evil plan to extract $1 per month from. This means my target audience is slightly over 90 members, of which 10% might actually subscribe.
After transfer fees, taxes, etc., that’s about $5 profit per month. Maybe $15, knowing how super awesome everybody knows I am. JGO is simply too small to make it worth while.
From a different angle: once people pay anything for a service, they suddenly feel entitled to the most arbitrary shit. I’m not going to expose myself to that.
I guess it all depends on whats being tracked, I’m against nefarious tracking as well. But things like Amazon tracking my IP/Session and detecting what products I viewed, then using that to send targeted ads to me elsewhere doesn’t seem all that terrible. All sites track where you’ve been, that’s just the nature of how websites work. I can load up any of my site’s stats right now and tell you what pages you visited on it (If I knew your IP).
(Disclaimer, the below statement is based on assumptions on what facebook is doing, I don’t use facebook nor have I really looked into the info-selling fiasco)
Even the facebook stuff doesn’t seem like a big deal, all the data (as far as I know?) they sell are public information you gave out to the internet anyway. If you mentioned Starbucks 100 times publicly, yeah, you might see some more Starbucks ads. You put the information out there, so it’s obviously not that private to you, so who cares if other’s “use” it? Would you rather get ads about Adult Diapers or that Starbucks is now selling Peppermint Lattes?
I guess when it all boils down to it, I really don’t care if I’m tracked as long as the intent isn’t malicious.
The intent might not be mallicious, but the information is stored ‘forever’, meaning that it’s not far fetched to assume one day it may be used against you.
insert argument about filing info about race prior to WWII, of which the nazis took advantage. why would neutral information ever be used against you, right -
Yup. Already seeing that with my game here and there. Human nature I guess. I think that’s why a lot of B-quality mobile apps go for being ad-supported, people are more willing to, and somehow, enjoy the game more when they know it’s a B-title going into it. When it’s free they usually complain less about the random bug here and there. But man, charge them a buck for it and suddenly they expect the same game to be a golden triple-A title, even though they would have gotten tons of enjoyment out of it when it was free, because “free” allowed their little minds to overlook the bugs. I guess it’s like the B-movie mentality, if you watch a movie already knowing it’s going to suck you enjoy it a lot more than if you expected a triple-A blockbuster. Even though the end result was the same movie.
I mean, I get that when you pay for a service you deserve a little bit more than if it was free. Like if we all paid $5/month for JGO, and the site was down half the day every day we’d have a valid complaint. But on the other hand, you get dumbasses coming in here complaining “I pay $5 a month why the f**k can’t I host uncompressed 1080p streaming video on the site? I have to use youtube!!!??” or something equally (or more) retarded.
Then, you can give your end users the choice between paying or seeing ads.
The corporation who created AdBlock is going to be prosecuted by several online service providers in my country. Its user base is enough to worry advertisers. You can give the choice to the end users or you can give them no choice. When the ad bubble breaks, there will be no other choice than suggesting something else, paid subscriptions, a price for each content, … When you create, it’s up to you to decide. Imagine that Facebook stops being “free of charge”, most of its users would pay rather than loosing tons of data and their “friends”.
The obtained data aren’t only used for providing more relevant ads. I don’t want people to know where I work, it’s my choice. When I’m tracked, they don’t respect my freedom and my privacy. Moreover, they can sell those data. It means that they make money from my personal data without my prior consent. No way I don’t accept it. I have no profile on LinkedIn, it’s intentional.
@CaptainJester I don’t suggest only “paywalls”. I proposed the global license and the global patronage. Moreover, in my case, I don’t look for money, I pay for my hosting cost, I don’t use ads, it’s ok for me.
Exactly. For you it is ok and that is great and I appreciate it. I also still appreciate it when people put things up for free and throw a quick Google Ad at the top in a banner. Take Kongregate for example. I have been on there for 7 years and they have always done advertising right. When you start to play a game you get an ad that plays and you have a choice after 10 seconds to continue viewing the ad, which I have done on occasion, or skip the ad. Then its right to your game with only a small banner ad at the top of the page.
I’ve always understood this argument, but I do not think it is that pressing of an issue, seeing as companies such as Google, Amazon, and other services that track various data about you, are opt-in, free services that you choose to use. And it’s not like they’re doing it against your will, or attempting to hide what they are doing. You choose to use the services that are most likely explicitly stating that they are tracking data about you in the agreements they make you read before using their service. And if someone ignores the agreement, and finds out that their data is being tracked later, then that is the fault of the user.
It is ridiculous, in my opinion, to get upset over something a free and opt-in service does. You made the choice to use that service, and if you simply didn’t use that service, you wouldn’t be tracked.
Ads are annoying, but I think they are necessary. As a student attending high school, with my only income coming from small freelance web development projects for small businesses around my area, I do not have a lot of money to spend on services that have pay walls. If some of the services I used required pay walls, I would simply not use them. For example, if this forum, or any forum for that matter, had a pay wall, I would simply not use it. The only service I pay for is Spotify, and that is because I wanted the upgrade to higher quality streaming. The ads were annoying (especially since Spotify plays random ad genres and does not target your music taste at all), but not annoying enough to warrant me spending money to get them to go away.
Edited-in addition:
Also, I feel like, if you are a service, such as a video game, that chooses to earn its revenue via an ad model, you should either abide by what it wants, or not use the service. Though you may feel that the revenue earned via this model is too minuscule to matter, this may not be the case. For example, what if the creator of the game payed an artist to have assets created, and expected to earn this money back via the ads in his game? By removing ads, you are not really being a fair sport. You probably wouldn’t go in and steal something off the shelf of your local grocery store, so you shouldn’t turn off ads either.
That’s why I encourage the creators to provide alternative means of “paying” them. The creators can have good intentions, I wouldn’t make such assumptions about the advertisers. I don’t encourage people to steal; when they really use a program whose author needs some support, they should accept the ads or pay but as long as the ads are used to steal data, I find it legitimate to block them all. I don’t make any assumption about the revenue but I make some assumptions about the hosting costs. I can take your last sentence and use it to justify the fact that I block ads but then the thieves aren’t the same.
It’s not ridiculous when it violates the national laws which Google did several times. Unfortunately, numerous corporations track people without their prior consents. For example, Facebook keeps some information about people NOT registered on Facebook in shadow profiles.
Once again, the choice isn’t only between ads and pay walls as in one hand the hosting costs are so sometimes small that it doesn’t justify to put tons of ads and in the other hand I talked about other means to earn some money without creating pay walls even though they aren’t for now as they need some massive legal changes (except donations via micro-payment, FlattR, …).
Are you really sure that you would refuse to pay for this forum if the price was very small? (for example 0.10 US dollars per month)
Lots of creators will have a big problem when the ad revenues decreases a lot. It’s better to diversify the source of revenue now.
Same problem. Way back in my past, I used to make a very popular Minecraft Resource Pack (one of the top 10, with about 50k downloads/month). I accepted donations and generated money from ad revenues, and people (even the ones who didn’t donate) felt that because I was earning money off the pack from people (About $100 every 2 month, mostly from ads but they didn’t know that.) they were entitled to all sorts of crap, like mod support for complex mods that would take months to complete. But, the Minecraft community on MCForums and PlanetMonecraft are pretty toxic communities anyway, so it might not be a fair sample.
On the flipside though, I took in donations for my “Adult only Minecraft server” up until Retro-Pixel Castles took off and I felt taking donations was greedy. The server has extremely high standards to join, and even with only 80 members it was generating about fifty to a few hundred dollars a month, and not a single person felt entitled at all. But it was a different demographic, they were highly respectful and successful adults who just wanted to help out. (You got nothing in return for donating) But again, they’re also not a fair sample size because they were on the polar opposite of the other sample from my resource pack. We have some very top-notch people, like people with doctoral degrees and other high end professionals with careers, families, and real lives who wanted to escape the toxicity of the Minecraft community.
I guess my end point is donations can work if you have the right community, but the public free game market where anyone can play without restrictions is not the right community, because those tend to have the most toxic of the user base.
Of course, you can simply take in donations and ignore the entitled brats, that’s what I did with my resource pack.
Of course, the only way for ad networks to deliver relevant advertising to individuals is if the individuals allow the ad networks to see their activity, searches, etc. If people continue to block this, the ads will never get better. That is the price to get more relevant content. Advertising is the currency that one “pays” to not pay for content in real $$$.
[quote]But, in theory, that’s what google/facebook/microsoft/amazon/everybody is doing when they “sell your information” as it is sorta misleadingly called. But we don’t like that either!
So, what’s the solution?
I like ad networks like Project Wonderful, who usually seem to show pretty decent advertisements (and they’re site-wide, not specific to a user), and hopefully the bigger ad networks get better at showing ads in a non-obtrusive way.
Is there a “good” way to do ads? Or are we all just waiting for the “ad bubble” to burst? What comes after that?
[/quote]
The way the ad bubble bursts is when people are willing to pay, with real $$$, for every little bit of any content they want to consume. Every show, every click, every YouTube video.
