Jimquisition: The Adblock Episode

[ClanCrusher]

I decided long ago to compromise and join the publisher's club. Been with them for almost three years running now and I'm happy to support the video makers here without the advertisers getting in the way. I do the same with pretty much every site that gives me the option.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

The ads aren't really too big of an inconvenience. Ads that stream in a video for example, I treat it like I would watching something on TV, mute the audio, or take the opportunity to get up and grab a snack or use the bathroom, whatever.

Doesn't that just push the problem up the chain? You want to be supported by ads, so you ask people to leave ads on, so you can get paid.

But the advertiser bought the ads to be seen. Why should they buy ads for your videos, if you're telling people not to watch them, anyway? They aren't getting the value out of buying the ads if people are letting them run but not watching.

We already have the publishers complaining about viewers ripping them off with Ad Block, we've certainly had complaints from advertising networks being ripped off by publishers. How long until we get the companies buying the ads complaining about being ripped off by the whole system? This seems almost certain to end in a steep decline in advertising revenue.

Bottom line, ads really aren't that bad as some folks wish to claim, but they can get worse if people keep blocking them.

How does that work? If people are blocking ads because they are annoying, it doesn't make any sense that they would get more annoying. If anything, advertisers should be making them less annoying so people will unblock the ads.

Above all though, I'd like to see content creators like Jim Sterling continue to be supported as I like what he does and I wish I could do it too.

How about finding a way to do it that everybody doesn't hate?

 

[krickit]

Adblock plus disabled on the escapist here. If I have too many problems with it, it goes off the whitelist again.
As a child, before I discovered the magical add-on which disabled certain scripts, I had extreme difficulties reading most type due to animated advertisements. This lead me with flash ads, more often than not, to use the often fickle pause option or rewind to stop it playing with flashing graphics and moving parts. At worst on some sites, I had to use the zoom in function to the extent I had a blank ad, lagging the old chunky box I used to browse on to death. When it came to gifs, if I really had to, I would remove them via some convoluted method thanks to firefox.

I do stress that this wasn't out of irritation, it was the simple fact that it took so much longer to read a paragraph of text when I lost my place every five seconds due to a skeleton moving across my screen asking me to play a bland RPG, or even a single line due to the shaking fake dialogue box with a message about winning a US greencard.
Hear that, animated avatar people? I don't read your posts. Well, I skipped most of the thread. It was long!

My recent method with adblock is this: if I regularly browse a website, check disable on example.com. If the ads are intrusive, the exception is removed. This has been down to my own laziness, and I had been doing it in order of how much I actually like and would like to support the content creators... The escapist wasn't near the top of the list, and thus I am only disabling it as I was politely reminded.

 

[Burning Desire]

i dont use ad block. i like ads it helps you stay aware if you did miss something. although i do hate and i mean hate having to sit through a thirty to sixty second ad for tampons and not being able to skip it after ten seconds. then having it pop up on the next ten videos im trying to watch

 

[Deshin]

This whole thing is a venerable minefield so I'll have to be extra careful with my words. First of all I'll put up a link to an article on this very website which is very relevant:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/125398-Malware-Infections-Are-Usually-From-Legitimate-Websites

As well as a little story: Many years ago, back when I still played Final Fantasy X,I a massive wave of hacks happened in a short amount of time. People were getting hacked left, right, and center and found their characters completely stripped of equipment and money. In the end we found out that the FFXI wiki page and FFXI-Atlas (website used for maps, mob spawns, quest markets, etc) had malware in their ad banners that is what caused all the hacks. Said attack was orchestrated by a popular mmo gold-selling site and though they were finally caught and prosecuted the total number of hacked individuals was roughly 15,000; many of which never managed to have their equipment/money restored.

I believe that, for many people, using such programs isn't about removing ads for the sake of denying websites revenue or even to streamline their browsing experience but do so from a sheer security standpoint. A very popular website that attracts hardcore gamers from all over the world must be a very juicy target for anyone looking to datamine a few thousand mmo logins, and I believe many people just do not want to take the risk. It's made all the worse that we live in an age where, socially and legally, the victim is blamed for their computer being infected. If someone has their computer infected by a virus or malware the general consensus is "your own fault for not having proper protection in place".

I hope my post isn't construed as "advocating" or "encouraging" (which would be a rule violation); I've merely stated verifiable facts on the current state of affairs with a source from this very site.

 

[Silly Hats]

I use adblock, I always whitelist my regular websites though. I generally prefer buying merchandise to support that way as opposed to sitting through ads, it's a win win.

 

[Ulquiorra4sama]

"If everyone blocked ads from running, there'd be no show."

But... But... I'm a pub club member!

Actually i was meaning to ask in this thread about that. If we do have ad block up and running while we're in the Pub Club that shouldn't impact content creators, right? I have to admit i don't fully understand how advertisers and host sites decide on what amount of money goes where...

 

[Infernal Lawyer]

I must live in some magical fantasy world where the worst thing an ad would ever do is replay when you restart a buggy Youtube video.

Funny thing is that I have more of an issue of ads on fucking TF2 servers of all things (Forces you to watch an ad, and then crashes IMMEDIATELY after the ad ends) than the amount of trouble people are claiming happen on their browsers.

So I guess it's kind of like the whole piracy debate: For the most part it's wrong, you're denying content creators their well deserved earners. However, when they start pulling bullshit (i.e. broken DRM/ads that crash your system), then things become less black and white, to the point where you're probably in your rights to tell them to piss right off.

 

[Kameburger]

I have a few points to make, but let's get something straight first. You post videos about video games, I watch em. That is the extent of our relationship. What happens backstage - how and where you get your money - is not my concern. Does the Escapist care how I make a living? I don't think so. A content creator's personal/financial problems fall completely outside of the scope of our relationship.

We are not friends, and as a member of the audience, I don't owe online content creators any special treatment. If one of them stops making content tomorrow, I'll just watch something else.

The vast majority of people who use adblock don't do it to spite the content creators. This isn't personal, it's about not wanting to be annoyed with ads. I don't like it when our motivation is misconstrued as ill-will. I also don't like to be guilt-tripped into "inconveniencing myself" for the sake of someone who works online.

I'd rather a content creator just said "I want more money, watch my ads", than try to turn it into an ethical problem.
Adblock users are not doing anything wrong, in spite of how much content creators tend to vilify them. If Jim's employer doesn't want to grant me free access to this website, they can just block me. Seeing that they do not and since I am well within my rights to watch this content, not watch any ads and express any criticism freely on the internet, fuck you right back, Jimbo.

Fact of the matter is I can still criticize your work even though I do not contribute to your paycheck. There is no legitimacy whatsoever to the argument that you should shut up if you don't contribute. If someone is being an asshole to you, you can call them out on being assholes, NOT on the fact that they don't contribute to your paycheck.

Let me explain how advertising works, in case you've been living on another planet thus far: Ads are something people watch if they want to, they aren't mandatory. If your content is good enough, then you might have enough people in the audience watching your ads to make a living off of. Some people might even whitelist your content out of goodwill. It is also your prerogative to plead with your audience to whitelist your stuff, even though they don't HAVE to and would just be doing you a favor if they did. HOWEVER... this does not mean you get to guilt trip/emotionally manipulate people into watching more ads and paint it like you're some fucking moral champion. You are, in fact, a dick if you try to create a divide in your audience by making it seem like the people who watch ads are somehow better human beings than those who don't.

That's all I had to say.

PS: The "terms of service" for this forum are ambiguous as all hell, I presume I can be flagged for being "offensive" to some.

I don't understand your argument here.

Emotional black mail would be if he showed you pictures of his starving children and said here's what happens when you use adblock, and he isn't doing that in the slightest. He goes so painstakingly out of his way to drive the point home that he is not trying to say that its wrong to use adblock, he is simply spelling out how it effects the escapist and himself as well as your part in that equation.

To spell this out for you, If you want to criticize him and not contribute, your opinion is still valuable. If you want to criticize him, not contribute, and be an asshole, then your opinion is valueless (worthless, meaningless, etc).

Most artist and content creators do what they do to interact with their audience, why does it offend you so much when they try to?

Seriously, the way you wrote that post, I almost feel like you're writing to the Make A Wish Foundation, because how dare they appeal to you for donations because those kids will never care about whether or not you're dying.

tl;dr

Calm down!

 

[JaqueAlan]

Well this episode convinced me to finally kill two birds with one stone. (Okay, a large stick.) I'm now an official member of the escapist and have a subscription.

 

[XMark]

What I'm wondering is how much control the Escapist has over the content of the ads? I would assume that The Escapist doesn't want ads to auto-play sound in the background while a video is playing or break page designs or block site navigation, but it happens anyways, and there's likely several degrees of separation between The Escapist and the company at the end of the line that delivers a specific ad.

It seems to be a self-propagating issue. People are blocking ads? Well, the ads need to be more in-your-face and annoying to have more effect on the portion of people who are not blocking them. But then more of those who wouldn't have blocked them before end up blocking them because they're that much more annoying, which means the advertisers have to make their ads more annoying, which means more people block them, which means they have to make them more annoying, which makes more people block them and so on and so forth.

I wonder if an advertising company could make a profitable business out of very strictly serving nothing but simple non-intrusive image-only ads with strict policies against deceptive practices like fake virus warnings. If they stuck to their guns, maybe their ads would be less visible to the public, but almost nobody would feel the need to block them either.

 

[VondeVon]

I had no idea that adblock had an effect at all. Companies can see that their ads *aren't* being seen?

I never click on ads anyway because they've never interested me and/or I'm convinced that doing so will cause viruses to spontaneously manifest themselves on all my computers at once, but I thought that advertisers only *paid* 'per click' in the first place?

 

[jaymiechan]

i run an adblocker, yes. However, i DO Whitelist sites. Even with whitelisting, i am still protected from the malicious bull that people pull because i run a heavily modified HOSTS file that prevents those connections that the bad ads try to cause.

 

[Synthetica]

The thing is: adblock users (just turned off mine btw, thanks for the reminder) don't care. It's both tragedy of the commons and "I don't see the ads, why would I care the ads get worse".

 

[IceForce]

This just seems really paranoid, and chilling to proper discussion. Can you tell us how far up The Escapist's management chain this authorisation of warning for people simply admitting to using ad blockers in this thread went? Who was it that approved the terms of this supposed "armistice"?

I'm wondering that too.

Jim okayed it with a mod, so I'm just wondering where in the chain of command this agreement took place.

Briefly discussed with a moderator yesterday that exceptions would have to be made here. I cannot speak for the admins, but I would like to believe they understand that, in order to comment here, an armistice is gonna be needed.

"Armistice" was an interesting and now sadly appropriate choice of words there, Jim:

armistice
noun
1. an agreement made by opposing sides in a war to stop fighting for a certain time; a truce.

Interesting (but not surprising) that users of the site are seen as enemies in a war. Also not surprising that it seems most of the forum rules are in place to protect advertisers and business interests, rather than to benefit users or provide a higher quality forum.

I'm no lawyer, but I'd say many of the people who have received warnings in this thread probably have a good case for appeal of those warnings.
Especially since people appear to have been misled to an extent.

Anyway, I'm confident Jim can get this all sorted out.

 

[Frozengale]

I had no idea that adblock had an effect at all. Companies can see that their ads *aren't* being seen?

I never click on ads anyway because they've never interested me and/or I'm convinced that doing so will cause viruses to spontaneously manifest themselves on all my computers at once, but I thought that advertisers only *paid* 'per click' in the first place?

I think I may have the answer. Of course I'm not well versed in online marketing so anyone is welcome to jump in and tell me I'm wrong.

If you obtain your ads from an AdFarm like "Ads by Google" or some other 3rd party that basically is an Ad database then you are paid by click. Basically the Ad Database people get paid by a company to host their Ads, and then the Ad Database makes it so that those Ads are easy to obtain for websites. So if you start a website right now, you could sign up to host ad space via someone like "Ads By Google". Since they offer this service relatively free and easy, you aren't paid per view but rather are paid by click. This ensures that it was your site that brought them to the website of whoever wanted the ad in the first place, and are thus paid. Basically you get easy advertising, the downside being you get paid by click.

However, someone like The Escapist doesn't use a 3rd party but rather deals with the companies in a more direct manner. Say some publisher wants to run some ads for the latest Shooter, so they go out and contact high profile gaming websites like The Escapist. They say they want them to run the ad for 2 months. Escapist hosts the ad, and for each view they get a little bit of cash, and for each click they get a little more. Their is probably also an initial cost they get paid upfront for hosting the ad.

That is my highly ill-informed and assumption heavy idea of what is going on.

 

[Veerdin]

What I realised watching this was pretty scary...

I love Jimquisition. Hell, I love this site! I've been coming here ever since Yahtzee moved from Youtube to this site and I don't think I'll ever stop.

I've also been using Adblock for longer than I can remember. And you know what's scary?

I had no damn clue the damage that was potentially doing.

I was vaguely aware of the whole "don't adblock our stuff you dirty content thieves!" fiasco that some people were pulling and frankly I didn't care for it, so I avoided it. I legitimately wasn't aware that by doing this I was essentially saying "I don't support your stuff" to the publishers themselves.

Adblock came with no warnings and I think Jim's the first person whose put this into calm, understanding words (Instead of froth-lined screeches) And because Jim asked nicely, and I quite like Jim and this whole site, I've white-listed it. Something I wasn't actually sure I could do until I tried.

I used adblock because I preferred things how they were when I started using the net, where I could watch a Youtube video without some smuck trying to sell me a fridge for 5 minutes beforehand. That was it, but now I'm gonna' try and find out if it's possible to disable adblock on certain Youtube Channels, cause I'd quite like Markiplier and Game Grumps to keep doing things.

 

[FalloutJack]

Aaand snippity

Well, since I don't use the blocker and I DO get annoyed at the intrusive ads, I'd like to make a request.

You've now made a video which explains the argument of why the ads are necessary, what your feelings on that are, and even where the real blame should be. Why not make one that tackles the issue on the other side, going into detail of the dangers of the intrusive ad at a time where people feel they need the things to make payroll? I feel that a general call to the sites on what works best and what should be avoided in the ad-potpourri that they're cooking up could be very useful. The more people that are informed in places like the Escapist, where people DO want to be here and enjoy the site without much inconvenience, the better.

It couldn't hurt to try, anyhow.

 

[fractal_butterfly]

My problem with Ads is a simple one: they take big chunks out of my monthly download volume. Let me explain: my Internet Service Provider, the only one available for me in the rural area I live in, decided that it would be best for his profits to impose a limit to the amount of downloaded data and make more "download-volume" available for extra pay. After I used up my "highspeed volume", I am slowed to a crawling 384 kbit/s (that is about 50 kbyte/s, hardly enough for emails or browsing, and definitely not enough for the Gigabyte of data I have to synchronize on a daily basis).
Now the thing is, that I need my fast internet for my work, which is programming and creating computer games. At the same time, I am one of these indie game makers (not the successful ones, I am struggeling at the moment), so I need every bit of money I can get or save.
That being said, I have to admit, that I am currently blocking the ads of "The Escapist", since they directly affect the amount of money I have available per month. I am not talking about inconveniences, I am talking about beeing able to pay rent. But Jim is really making a fine argument, so I can no longer watch "The Escapist" with an activated Ad Blocker. I will deactivate it, although I am impeding my work with it and having me cost actual money. But I think this site and your show is worth it.

 

[DigChrono]

I used to block ads on everything, a few months ago I turned it off for Youtube, and now I'm turning it off for the Escapist. I'm actually considering joining the Publisher's Club soon, since I come here so often.