this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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The infamous x (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Any ideas for ad blockers that work with a blacklist rather than the contrary?

I don't want to harm the revenue stream of websites I visit unless their ads are unacceptable. So I want it not blocking ads by default. But I'd really like a way to block the website-breaking ads at Fextralife Elden Ring wiki. That shit is crazy; it breaks the search bar until EVERY ad (including autoplay video, even though I disabled autoplay video in settings) has fully loaded.

I do almost all of my browsing with Firefox for Android.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I don’t want to harm the revenue stream of websites

Perhaps if a product cannot survive without ads it has grown too large or just isn't that necessary? I too could be making extra by creating content and throwing ads on it, but it's not ethical so I don't. Humanity should always strive towards a utopia and a utopian society has zero ads.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Servers and bandwidth aren't free. Someone needs to pay for it. There are roughly seven ways to fund a website:

  • Complete volunteering, and maintainer pays all fees out of pocket. Only makes sense for very small projects, or when the maintainer is rich and has a great deal of passion or otherwise self-interest in the project.
  • Strictly fund the website with donations. That's more or less how Wikipedia works. It can be hard to make ends meet, and it typically only works if your website basically offers community service like a charity or if you have very passionate users.
  • Freemium model: most users are just leeches and are subsidized by the few who pay for the premium version. This is more or less how free-to-play video games work, and some newspapers survive this way. It can be difficult to convince people.
  • Members only: you literally cannot use the website unless you pay. A lot of SAAS websites, especially for businesses, work this way. It can be a hard sell for a lot of service categories.
  • Ads. Sometimes combined with a freemium model, where you can pay to remove the ads. YouTube works this way.
  • Sell user data to advertisers or more sinister entities. Only possible if you have valuable user data to sell. Most social networks get a significant portion of their revenue from this method, but they typically combine it with ads.
  • Use venture capital to disturb an existing market at a loss, get massive mindshare and maybe even kill existing competition, and jack the prices up to repay your debts and turn a profit once you have customers and the market is more favourable. Airbnb works this way.

What would you do for review sites? News sites? Video game wikis?

Wouldn't it suck if a wiki for an old game was just gone because there aren't many players anymore, and now you just can't access the info in it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

https://www.tax-the-rich.eu* and increase government funding towards legitimate projects that can't be ethically financed alone. That and universal basic income.

* Official European Union petition.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

That would work for projects important enough to be worth the government's attention. But we don't want every small project ever to be dependent on that.

Do you really see some teenager trying to meet a civil servant to explain how their Super Random RPG 2025 wiki is worth it, and the project is finally accepted (or refused, because the civil servant isn't too hot about giving government money to something about video games) half a year later, when the most intense players, who would have contributed to such a platform a lot, have already finished the game?

I absolutely like that idea and I think it could be great for big sites like Wikipedia and various Internet Archive projects.

But I really don't think it solves everything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I wish I could remember the name of an extension I had on my old computer.

It hid all ads, but also clicked them all in the background. It accomplished 4 goals:

  1. I didn't see the ads
  2. The websites I visited made more money through the clicks
  3. It cost the advertisers money
  4. It made the cost/benefit worse for advertisers since they were paying for clicks without anyone being influenced by the ads
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I've got a feeling that advertising companies have ways to differentiate real and fake clicks. Best case scenario, they wouldn't count those. Worst case scenario, they could notice that too many clicks are fake and revoke the monetization for a website.

If captchas exist, surely they can use similar methods to catch ad cheats like that.

This is older, and not quite the same but back when I was into private Ragnarok Online servers, it was pretty well-known among server admins that you couldn't ask people to click your ads. Either because you asked, either because they noticed unusual activity, Google would demonetize the ads pretty quickly.