The Verge: The internet is dying a slow death because of ad blockers

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Fiction said:
If they make ads 100% virus free, not annoying popups that block out part or the screen or autoplay audio, then I would never use adblock again.
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I concur.Although having adblock for sites that like to track your activities would still be necessary.

Vincent Grayson said:
I'd argue that the vast majority of "content" on the web isn't worth even the most trivial amount of money if it had to be paid for directly.

I'm interested to see what the next shift is in terms of monetizing things that aren't worth money.
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Dang that is sharp as a knife. But if that is the case wouldn't that make sites like FB ultimately fail? I mean do people really want to pay for to see what some other douche bag is doing / their life? I hope not. If that is the case. Bringing a sharp decline to social media I'm all for it. Having a subscription model fro sites that you thoroughly enjoy like gaf, nexus, etc. or some other form i.e. allowing ads on sites that have non intrusive advertising.

Couleurs said:
I don't mind ads. What I do mind are websites that are completely unable to show any restraint or refuse to police pop ups, redirects, long load times, and pages that shift all over the place while the 200 ads/scripts load and waste my data plan on my phone. So websites like The Verge have no one to blame but themselves for the mess they are finding themselves in. Meanwhile I'm happy to whitelist sites that don't abuse ads and are quick to take action to remove popups/redirects (like Neogaf).
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Same. I pretty have have white listed like 12 sites.
 
Also looking at alexa stats makes it 100% clear that ad block is not the verge's issue:

Bounce Rate
68.40% 3.00%
Daily Pageviews per Visitor
1.76 3.83%
Daily Time on Site
2:42 9.00%

Basically 70% of visitors to your site get the fuck out of there immediately after the page loads, which should tell you you need to work on your user experience badly.

This is how I imagine the average visitor to the verge:

zFxgZdP.jpg


The trends aren't positive either.
 
So I went to The Verge to see what all the hubbub is about:

nilay3.png


Redirect loop from hell? That's not very promising. After refreshing again:

nilay2.jpg


Get fucked Nilay.
 
oti xero said:
For me to buy a subscription for a tech site like The Verge they'd need to step up their content game significantly. I don't care about news, I can get them pretty much everywhere and they're recycled press releases, just like in the gaming world. Reviews are cool but I don't buy a new laptop or phone every two months to be invested in that stuff and youtubers have been eating their lunch with more specialised views. For instance I can't relate to a reviewer that tells me they finally feel great holding a Samsung whatever phone because it isn't made out of plastic anymore. Also their strong Apple bias made me question every review, but that seems to be a bigger problem in that field.

So, what else could they do? Longer articles? Premium podcasts? I don't really know to be honest. You can only do so much with gadgets and some Apps. To me they're lacking relatable personalities that add more to the experience in a way that would make me want to watch all of their reviews, even if I didn't particularly care much about the reviewed pieces of tech. Again though, I don't think the Verge is the only outlet with those problems.
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I think this is part of the problem as well, especially for written content. There is a lot of overlap as sites just regurgitate whatever press releases entered their inbox that day, then reviews and whatnot aren't that special. As much as some of these content creators claim that what they're making is fresh and original in many cases I just don't see that being the case. They just come off as Baghdad Bobs spinning what they're doing and justifying their ads with viewers and readers just thinking, "Oh, come off it!" and dismissing them.

To a degree personality can make up for this, and it's why we see some YouTube channels do very well for themselves. These channels don't even necessarily need high production values if folks simply like the cut of the person(s) jib. These are the places that can win over folks with Patreon, donations, paid subs, etc. It won't be the cookie cutter sites that largely do the same thing while claiming to somehow be special.
 
It would be great to not have to block ads, but ad companies keep pushing larger and louder ads, and bandwidth caps are a big issue for people. Ads actually cost users money if they're dealing with strict data caps. Until that gets sorted out (as well as making ads secure for users) ad blocking is going to be a necessity for browsing most of the internet.
 
Mr Nash said:
I think this is part of the problem as well, especially for written content. There is a lot of overlap as sites just regurgitate whatever press releases entered their inbox that day, then reviews and whatnot aren't that special. As much as some of these content creators claim that what they're making is fresh and original in many cases I just don't see that being the case. They just come off as Baghdad Bobs spinning what they're doing and justifying their ads with viewers and readers just thinking, "Oh, come off it!" and dismissing them.

To a degree personality can make up for this, and it's why we see some YouTube channels do very well for themselves. These channels don't even necessarily need high production values if folks simply like the cut of the person(s) jib. These are the places that can win over folks with Patreon, donations, paid subs, etc. It won't be the cookie cutter sites that largely do the same thing while claiming to somehow be special.
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The Verge and Polygon stand out when it comes to presentation. Their videos are beautifully shot and they're longer articles nice to look at. For some people that's enough to make them appear more "mature" than other sites. At least I seem to have some friends who think that way. They wouldn't share a destructoid link for instance, even if that's the source. For whatever reason they feel better sharing the polygon link which seems to be the more accepted or "normal" website.

I personally don't care though about their style and especially with the Verge I find myself rolling my eyes more often than not. Them positioning a smartphone in a trashcan full of glass or their Apple Watch review is just ridiculous. Polygon and their documentary how they founded the site was... pretty special too. Just notnmy cup of tea. I prefer Tested.
 
Mr Nash said:
To a degree personality can make up for this, and it's why we see some YouTube channels do very well for themselves. These channels don't even necessarily need high production values if folks simply like the cut of the person(s) jib. These are the places that can win over folks with Patreon, donations, paid subs, etc. It won't be the cookie cutter sites that largely do the same thing while claiming to somehow be special.
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This works for individuals or small groups, won't work on a large professional scale.
 
iamblades said:
Basically 70% of visitors to your site get the fuck out of there immediately after the page loads, which should tell you you need to work on your user experience badly.
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I don't think it's bad. If other users are like me, they load up the Verge and see if there's anything interesting that isn't clickbait bullshit. If not, I don't click and just move on to another site. At one point they had some great content but they've gone noticeably downhill.

I'm pretty sure the decline coincides with Topolsky leaving and spikey bracelet man taking over. Roughly July 2014.
 
n3ss said:
This works for individuals or small groups, won't work on a large professional scale.
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I'm kind of okay with this. Large equates far more with homogenization than anything else for me these days, maybe because they are so large. Regardless of sector, products / IPs that come from large companies just strikes me as boring and has probably gone through a gauntlet of focus groups before hitting the market. They may be highly practical, and if it's something relevant to my needs I may well get it, but it often isn't all that interesting.

When it comes to content on the internet, unless it's the news, which falls well under the category of "practical", I'm looking for something far more unique and few large scale operations really do that for me.
 
n3ss said:
So you want only a handful of sites to exist?

Look. There are ton of ad networks out there, Google being the most strict, but not everyone uses them (or uses them in combination with others). People here are blocking everyone on the net because they clicked on a few native ads or frequently visit poorly ran sites.

They only way it would work like you describe above is having a single (and very regulated) ad network. I don't see that working either.
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No, what we want is compromise. The Free Market will find an equilibrium where content producers and consumers can both be happy with the transaction. Both sides have a say. Over the last decade content producers have run unchecked, this is the correction.

It's happened before and it'll happen again.
 
The eventual, and perhaps it's happening already, problem on smaller YouTube channels is there is no one standing over for integrity. What's to stop them from taking on deals for product placements?

Instead of relying on larger sites I've started to gravitate towards smaller ones and even paying for them. I currently pay for GiantBomb, Macstories and Stratchery. Why? Their content is good and often very original. I also have taken to newsletters from sites like The Awl, Medium, David Pell, This and Lisa Scheimer. Some are just good aggregates but Pell and Scheimer are well thought out and hand picked stories for the week/day.
 
I'd have more sympathy if their site wasn't so ad-heavy that it struggled to load at all on an iPad before I installed an ad blocker.
 
Rip the internet. It was a good run.

I wonder what percent of people actually know about ad block and choose to use it. I work in tech support and extremely rarely see it on people's computers.
 
The other thing I think The Verge, et al, need to realize is that *adverts* are driving people to look for ad blockers. The more in your face and obnoxious your advert is, the more likely that person is to go off and install an ad blocker.

The shit that's happening on sites *like* the Verge created the market for this. When advertisers are regularly getting hacked and their adverts are pushing viruses to people, that's on them to have better security. When you go to the website and there's an advert you have to watch first... that's on you for putting it there. When the adverts crash the website, or jam up your browser, or start playing sound when you can't even see them... can you blame anyone from making an ad blocker or installing one.

Again, I don't use an ad blocker. I just avoid shit websites caked in advertising crap.

Like the Verge.
 
The unspoken truth missed by this misdirection by Nilay is the fact that The Verge and similar sites don't want other forms of monetization such as subscription or micropayments, because that would bring them peanuts compared to the gorged feast they have been enjoying from exploiting the unwitting via their resource heavy marketing ridiculousness dressed up as "free content".

They don't want change, they want the feast to continue and are super salty that technology is being used to starve the beast instead of feeding it more.

Ads on traditional media are passive on my part, they don't require anything of me other than my attention, and because of that sometimes I'll give them that, ads online use bandwidth that I pay for, use my computing resources and significantly impact the overall perfromance and usefulness of the platform I'm using.

That is a step too far, I don't block ads because I'm selfish, I block ads because the people serving them up are.

To be utterly frank, and I wish Nilay could actually read this, but Nilay, fuck you and those like you, If you get around my blocks I won't fight you with technology, I'll ignore you and blacklist your sites in my hosts file, your content just isn't worth the price you have put on it and I'll quite happily go on with life without it and without even giving it a second thought.

Bloviate on twitter though, please, that is free entertainment, easily accessed in a million places without ads to worry about.
 
AdBlockers are not killing the internet.

The major media companies inability to adjust to the technical age and change their business models to reflect it is what is killing those specific media companies.

If you can't make enough money via ad impressions because the majority of your users block your intrusive adverting, then you need a new way to generate income - not complain to your users to stop blocking your intrusive ads.

If the majority of your users won't pay for your content, then it's because your content isn't worth paying for.

The entire internet media consumption system has been flawed for a long time. And crying that the system doesn't work anymore just makes you look like a sore loser. If you can't make money from ad impressions, you need to charge for content in other ways. If you can't charge for content in other ways, because no one will pay for your content, then you shouldn't be in business in the first place.
 
You made your bed, now lie in it. The years of scumbag ads and shitty popups are finally catching up to everyone that profited off it and made web browsing shittier and shittier. Listen to these Chicken Littles screaming about the sky falling... what did you fucking expect? Now it's not just enthusiasts blocking your garbage, it's a mainstream, growing population of anti-ad users that block indiscriminately. Of course your abusive ads created this "problem", why are you surprised?

It's pretty fucking sad that people have to selectively allow ads to support their favorite sites AFTER their trust has been gained.
 
It's those obnoxious ads that ruined it for everyone. Not only are they irritating but they take too much resources too.
 
Goldenmoney said:
Rip the internet. It was a good run.
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I remember the internet before it was littered with ads.

It was people swapping information, talking on forums about every subject known to man, no matter how niche, and of course downloading porn. Hey, 7 hours on a decent connection could get you a tiny black and white animated GIF of some genital slapping action. Ok, maybe 4 or 5 frames of said action, but when you're that young its totally worth it.

*adjusts his belt onion*
 
Osiris said:
The unspoken truth missed by this misdirection by Nilay is the fact that The Verge and similar sites don't want other forms of monetization such as subscription or micropayments, because that would bring them peanuts compared to the gorged feast they have been enjoying from exploiting the unwitting via their resource heavy marketing ridiculousness dressed up as "free content".

They don't want change, they want the feast to continue and are super salty that technology is being used to starve the beast instead of feeding it more.

Ads on traditional media are passive on my part, they don't require anything of me other than my attention, and because of that sometimes I'll give them that, ads online use bandwidth that I pay for, use my computing resources and significantly impact the overall perfromance and usefulness of the platform I'm using.

That is a step too far, I don't block ads because I'm selfish, I block ads because the people serving them up are.

To be utterly frank, and I wish Nilay could actually read this, but Nilay, fuck you and those like you, If you get around my blocks I won't fight you with technology, I'll ignore you and blacklist your sites in my hosts file, your content just isn't worth the price you have put on it and I'll quite happily go on with life without it and without even giving it a second thought.

Bloviate on twitter though, please, that is free entertainment, easily accessed in a million places without ads to worry about.
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2013_%2525207_26_%2525200_%2525201.gif
 
Ads have changed. It's no longer about products, ideologies or marketing. It's an endless series of proxy sales, sold by Sponsored writers and metric analyzing machines. Ads, and its consumption of bandwidth, cpu cycles and space, have become a well-oiled machine. Ads have changed. Ad-sponsored writers write Ad-sponsored articles, use Ad-redirects from previous Ad information gained in your personal global advertising record. Metrics inside their Systems enhance and regulate their banners. Information control. Emotion control. Everything is monitored, and kept under control. Ads have changed. The age of the Web startups has become the age of control. All in the name of advertising merchandise from content redistributors and aggregators. And he who controls the Ads, controls the media. Ads have changed. When the internet is under total control, Ads... becomes routine.

This is only the beginning. The internet will descend into chaos... It'll be the Wild West all over again. No law, no order. Fire will spread across the web. The people will fight... and through flame wars, they will know the fullness of life. At last... our father's will... his Adblocker... is complete.
 
Kenstar said:
Ads have changed. It's no longer about products, ideologies or marketing. It's an endless series of proxy sales, sold by Sponsored writers and metric analyzing machines. Ads, and its consumption of bandwidth, cpu cycles and space, have become a well-oiled machine. Ads have changed. Ad-sponsored writers write Ad-sponsored articles, use Ad-redirects from previous Ad information gained in your personal global advertising record. Metrics inside their Systems enhance and regulate their banners. Information control. Emotion control. Everything is monitored, and kept under control. Ads have changed. The age of the Web startups has become the age of control. All in the name of advertising merchandise from content redistributors and aggregators. And he who controls the Ads, controls the media. Ads have changed. When the internet is under total control, Ads... becomes routine.

This is only the beginning. The internet will descend into chaos... It'll be the Wild West all over again. No law, no order. Fire will spread across the web. The people will fight... and through flame wars, they will know the fullness of life. At last... our father's will... his Adblocker... is complete.
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picgifs-metal-gear-solid-821094.gif
 
I want an AdBlocker for cinemas.

I went to the movies last week and sat through an half hour of adverts before the damn film started. Only one of those ads was a trailer for a different film.

That's insulting and, frankly borderline abusive.
I've already paid them good money, a lot of it, and they've got me as a captive audience... straight up bullshit I say.
 
Banderdash said:
I want an AdBlocker for cinemas.

I went to the movies last week and sat through an half hour of adverts before the damn film started. Only one of those ads was a trailer for a different film.

That's insulting and, frankly borderline abusive.
I've already paid them good money, a lot of it, and they've got me as a captive audience... straight up bullshit I say.
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I haven't been to a theatre in years because of that nonsense.
 
Just because you "create content" online does not mean that you deserve money for it. Grow and adapt, or continue to struggle. Just charge your users to use your site and if your "content" is good enough, you'll do just fine.
 
The Verge lost a lot of appeal after removing commentaries. 90% of your content is bad, but before at least was fun read the commentaries.
 
Websites are having more intrusive ads these days. Just look at Youtube. An ad every freakin second. They can have ads, but only healthy amount of them.
 
Ad's on the internet are fucking crazy, and unless I trust(and respect) you completely that you aren't crazy, I'm not turning the blocker off. (so for example, Neogaf is unblocked)
 
AtomicShroom said:
The money should come from an advertising network that has strict guidelines forbidding (and actively enforcing it) the kinds of ads we've mentioned in this thread so far (viruses, popups, pop-unders, redirects, app store shitty application, covering the whole page, sound, obnoxious, made to look like OS, made to look like download button, deceitful, etc.) So what you're telling me is that it's impossible to have a website that generates enough money to survive without resorting to those kinds of ads? Is that what you're telling me? If so then yeah, those sites need to die and I will not give a care in the world.
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Google used to be that advertising network. There's a reason that it was the only thing I used for NeoGAF for many years, and every experiment with other networks always resulted in immediately ditching it to go back to Google. Simple text or image banners, strict standards for questionable content, no malware, no bullshit.

Then Google acquired or destroyed all the competition, and its standards have become more and more loose over time. I completely disabled ads on NeoGAF mobile for like half a year because of the app store redirect issue, but eventually had to give up and go back to monetizing it with Google despite the issue remaining unresolved. This was pretty shocking because Google never allowed malware to persist (or exist at all) on its network previously. But it was between that or not monetize the pages on mobile at all, and the redirects were infrequent enough that I made that call.

Most websites really have no alternative, too, because they can't afford a dedicated ad team with enough pull to set up private deals constantly.
 
I'd like to see something like Google Contributor be expanded, where I just pay a monthly subscription to some ad or ecommerce service to be distributed to websites based on how often I visit them.
 
EviLore said:
Google used to be that advertising network. There's a reason that it was the only thing I used for NeoGAF for many years, and every experiment with other networks always resulted in immediately ditching it to go back to Google. Simple text or image banners, strict standards for questionable content, no malware, no bullshit.

Then Google acquired or destroyed all the competition, and its standards have become more and more loose over time. I completely disabled ads on NeoGAF mobile for like half a year because of the app store redirect issue, but eventually had to give up and go back to monetizing it with Google despite the issue remaining unresolved. This was pretty shocking because Google never allowed malware to persist (or exist at all) on its network previously. But it was between that or not monetize the pages on mobile at all, and the redirects were infrequent enough that I made that call.

Most websites really have no alternative, too, because they can't afford a dedicated ad team with enough pull to set up private deals constantly.
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Out of curiosity, would NeoGAF still be profitable if all ads were blocked on mobile?
 
The Sarcastic Dude said:
Love how so many people in this thread felt the need to confess to everyone how the don't and would never use adblock on GAF.
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Ads on Neogaf are usually screened and are non obtrusive. If a problem happens with a ad on gaf it's dealt with pretty quickly. Neogaf are one of the good sites, and no one want's gaf to end up searching for new homes like in the past. Remaking accounts, and such, those times were dark.
 
Do people even click on ads when they dont have adblock? I think that's the real issue. I've been trained to not even acknowledge them because nothing useful ever comes out of them. They have the rethink the entire way they advertise.
 
The Sarcastic Dude said:
Love how so many people in this thread felt the need to confess to everyone how the don't and would never use adblock on GAF.
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Yeah, it's funny but it's also a pretty good example of sensible use of ad-blocking on a site-to-site basis, and not some scorched earth policy. (although hopefully sites start finding a better solution that isn't all too often super obnoxious, which in turn makes using adblock feel like something of a necessity for heavy internet users)
 
The Sarcastic Dude said:
Love how so many people in this thread felt the need to confess to everyone how the don't and would never use adblock on GAF.
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/shrug I practice what I preach. It's simple, really: give me ads that are non-obtrusive, no viruses, and don't take up the whole screen and I'll whitelist the site. Gaf does these things, thus I whitelist them (although the App Store redirects were pissing me off, lol. Engadget also tends to be pretty good, so I whitelist them. Shacknews is hit and miss (much better lately with the new owners and such) but they're my "primary" game site/forum so I whitelist them. Most other sites I visit often tho are awful about ads so I block them.
 
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