slacker (s@lack.er) on 4/23/12 wrote:
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>iz (i@z.x) on 4/22/12 wrote:
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>>Neither of you answered my question. Do you watch all TV ads or not? Because the moral argument is the same.
>
>Sort of. The majority of my television watching comes in the form of live sporting
>events. If it's football, there are zero commercials, but I have to stare at ugly
>adverts all around the pitch. If it's hockey/basketball, the commercials, are usually
>short. The remainder of what I watch is usually time-shifted content, so I skip over commercials.
>
>However, I reject that the "moral argument" is entirely the same between blocking
>ads, and skipping television commercials. When I pay for cable television, money flows from:
>
>Me --> Cable provider --> Cable network --> Television show creators
>
>Thus, even when I'm skipping commercials, there's still a flow of cash from me to content creators.

Are you sure about that? My impression is that most commercial channels only earn money with advertising and not via subscriptions. Probably because of historical reasons as TV used to be broadcast over the air and there was no way to stop people from receiving it (that's how The Netherlands used to have free BBC).

>
>In contrast, when you block all ads on a site, you have completely denied that
>website of income. That is, unless, you'd be willing to pay for a subscription.
>Would you pay even $10/year for access to this site in exchange for no banner ads?
>No? Then you're probably a freeloader.

I would certainly be willing to pay $10/year, more too.

But the thing to keep in mind is that it should be something voluntary, so it feels more like donating than paying for access. Locking down doesn't wok, you just get less viewers and no one will buy it because they're not going to buy something they don't know.

>>If TV ads would be of good quality and only between programs
>
>Watch Dutch programming.

That's what I've been doing most of my life. Maybe that's why my tolerance for ads is so low.

But although it's pretty good and there is a media law that limits the amount of ads allowed (used to be 10%, but seems to have moved to 20%), it got bad enough that it's barely worth watching any more. It's not as bad as in some other countries, but still.

The global trend seems to be that the public channels become as bad as the commercial ones used to be, and the commercial ones go a step way too far.

That's what happened in Australia, where it used to be pretty good, similar to The Netherlands, except with lower ad quality. (Die Harvey Norman, die! Imagine my surprise when I heard that exact damn annoying voice on the Irish radio.) But now most channels are total madness and unbearable. 5 minutes ads out of every 15 minutes for popular programs, and watching a film is hopeless because the closer you get to the end, the more ads, until you're only watching ads and forgot what the film was about. They butchered their TV.

>
>>If I visit a website, I do that because I want to visit THAT website, not some
>>random crap on the internet.
>
>It is likely that many of the websites you visit only exist because of advertising-oriented income.

I don't think the internet would be a much worse place if most websites that solely depend on ad revenue would disappear. I do not feel obliged to keep the whole crazy ads-everywhere thing alive.

It's time for the lemmings to realise that quality is much more important than quantity.

>> By not hosting the ads yourself you don't take responsibility
>>for them (and also slowing down the loading).
>
>Where do you expect small websites to find advertisers if not through advertising
>networks? Do you expect these small websites to partner with vendors directly? Vendors
>have millions of dollars in advertising dollars they need to spend. They aren't
>going to accept the overhead of dealing with 10,000 advertising outlets, each representing
>$1000 in business. It's not like David can go to Intel and say, "hi, I represent
>$250 per week in advertising value to you."
>
>Small, tech-based websites have no option other than to deal with advertising networks.
>This means they are stripped of the ability to self-host the advertisements.

All that is needed is one advertising network that gives website owners more control over what ads are shown and the option to host the ads themselves. I'm not saying it's realistic for small websites to gather enough advertisers together themselves. A bunch of small sites can start such advertising network themselves, if they want. Or they could go to e.g. Google and explain what they want.

>>>I think it's very hard for the little guy to carve out a living in this way.
>>
>>It's also very hard for the little guy to carve out a living with ad revenue. But
>>it can't hurt to give the option, can it?
>
>RWT used to offer a membership program when I first started reading. They eliminated it for some reason.

It might have been too formal or too rigid, or plainly too expensive so no one got it.