Comic Strips

It's ironic, they depend on perpetual growth, which means the more efficient they get at growing, the faster they outgrow their effective markets and then end up in a position where they need to further optimize optimal positions.

Sure, there's probably smaller optimizations they could make, but they don't just depend on growth but a certain % of growth.

Cornering markets is the beginning of the end for businesses in our growth obsessed system.

What they're "forgetting" is that those who block ads are more likely to say "fuck product X I'll never buy it because of this ad" if forced to see an ad. (Well, they don't care, they know, but they can still sell the "spot" so to speak because the advertisers themselves are dumb enough not know that it is just shooting themselves in the foot.)

I certainly do lot miss the days when I'd go onto a website covered in ads for cheap, garbage MMOs... And then suddenly hear random music really fucking loudly. Scrambling to figure out where it's coming from I'd find 4 or 5 smaller windows has opened up behind my main browser window.

Honestly I wouldn't even mind some basic banner flashing, i.e. not neon fucking strobe and plastered over everything. I can understand them wanting to get a little bit of an eye catch. But not all of the ads can be like that and not with pop-ups and shit.

Yep, they brought it upon themselves, I still remember as a kid falling for a "you are the visitor number 1 million" and getting a virus; and now we have porn and cults advertising on youtube, nothing changed.

You can't seem to grasp that we're not just single people. We're a force that also influences the non-tech people around us.

When I use, repair or configure the computer of a friend or family member, it'll definitely get an adblocker.

Well first it's not "fuck you", its "goodbye". And second it's not about "you", it's about "me" not visiting your site if I need to turn off adblock. End of the story, our path will not cross again. Ciao, aurevoir, hasta not luego.

I completely get your point, and to an extent I agree, but I do think there's still an argument to be made.

For instance, if a theme park was charging an ungodly amount for admission, or maybe, say, charged you on a per-ride basis after you paid admission, slowly adding more and more charges to every activity until half your time was spent just handing over the money to do things, if everyone were to stop going in, the theme park would close down, because they did something that turned users away.

Websites have continually added more and more ads, to the point that reading a news article feels like reading 50% ads, and 50% content. If they never see any pushback, then they'll just keep heaping on more and more ads until it's physically impossible to cram any more in.

I feel like this is less of a dunk on the site by not using it in that moment, and more a justifiable way to show that you won't tolerate the rapidly enshittified landscape of digital advertising, and so these sites will never even have a chance of getting your business in the future.

If something like this happens enough, advertisers might start finding alternative ways to fund their content, (i.e. donation model, subscription, limited free articles then paywall) or ad networks might actually engage with user demands and make their systems less intrusive, or more private. (which can be seen to some degree with, for instance, Mozilla's acquisition of Anonym)

Even citing Google's own research, 63% of users use ad blockers because of too many ads, and 48% use it because of annoying ads. The majority of these sites that instantly hit you with a block are often using highly intrusive ads that keep popping up, getting in the way, and taking up way too much space. The exact thing we know makes users not want to come back. It's their fault users don't want to see their deliberately maliciously placed ads.

A lot of users (myself most definitely included) use ad blockers primarily for privacy reasons. Ad networks bundle massive amounts of surveillance technology with their ads, which isn't just intrusive, but it also slows down every single site you go to, across the entire internet. Refusing that practice increases the chance that sites more broadly could shift to more privacy-focused advertising methods.

Google recommends to "Treat your visitors with respect," but these sites that just instantly slap up an ad blocker removal request before you've even seen the content don't actually respect you, they just hope you're willing to sacrifice your privacy, and overwhelm yourself with ads, to see content you don't even know anything about yet. Why should I watch your ads and give up my privacy if you haven't given me good reason to even care about your content yet?

This is why sites with soft paywalls, those that say you have "x number of free articles remaining," or those that say "you've read x articles this month, would you consider supporting us?" get a higher rate of users disabling adblockers or paying than those that just slap these popups in your face the moment you open the site.

Yes and no. Similar with apps, you can say "well if you're not paying/seeing adds then we lose nothing by you not visiting", but, depending on their growth stage, it's very hard to grow and get investors without a sizable audience.

Say you're a startup. If you have 10k people and you ignore ad blockers and people who don't play subscriptions. Then you start preventing people with ad blockers and no subscriptions from your platform and it drops to 1k... You lose investment pulling power.

The effect is amplified, or much worse, if you actually require user generated content as well

Ignore the last panel and it makes way more sense. When the site demands I see their ads, I leave that site and look for that same content elsewhere. There’s never a time when I think “HA! Gotteem!” I just don’t engage with the site, and don’t care about it or who else does.

I'm fine with ads when they don't take up half my screen or try and shift the page to to trick me into clicking on them, should a stuck with sidebar adds.

If your website is a business, you need to have a business model. If your business model isn't sustainable, because it relies on not annoying visitors too much, maybe look for a better one.

Btw, most newspages have adapted some 10 years ago already, showing the important news for free and additional details with paid account. A lot have the balance off tho.

News sites are in need of a paradigm shift.

I think we might get to a system where summaries of news are free, but indepth articles and videos are paid.

Oh and I believe that news sites should scrap subscription only models, I should be able to pay 1-2EUR for a single article that I want to read, with no risk of the payment being a subscription.

Obviously subscriptions models should still be an alternative if the users want it.

You can say "bullshit" here, lemmy isn't so concerned with making everything child friendly to appease advertisers like tiktok or youtube.