philcrissman.com

I’ve talked about this before, but I think that it bears a continuing discussion.

Peter Cooper, author of Beginning Ruby and the Ruby Inside blog (which you should all read), levels some objections to ad-blocking here:

I’ve never used adblocking, and will never use adblocking unless ads become /so/ obnoxious that I can’t productively experience whatever it is the advertising is plasted to.

Why? Because advertising is part of our lives, our culture, and a serious part of how our economy continues to function. Actively opting out of advertising exposure, without doing something yourself, is removing one side of the bargain in commercial situations. It’s like shoplifting. If you want something from the other party, you gotta do your own part.

If TV companies want to keep running shows like The Simpsons, Doctor Who, or whatever, they either need to make money with advertising, taxes (like the BBC does), or charge a premium subscription (a la HBO). If enough people fail to watch the ads, their efficiency drops, and then suddenly you’ve gotta pay more to watch the TV you like. It’s a bit like not voting.. if everyone stopped voting, control is in the hands of the few.

Same goes for radio, Web sites, and other forms of media. If you actively censor advertising, media providers will have to resort to other ways to balance out the implicit transaction between themselves and their consumers. Those “balances” are, I feel, unacceptable.. do we really want more annoying interstital pages, lower quality content, or sites shutting down because they couldn’t make a subscription model stick? It’s no for me, although perhaps you’d like that idea.

I understand his argument, I just don’t buy it 100%.

If taken to extremes, it approaches absurdity. For example, if I mute the television during advertisements, or get up to use the toilet, make a snack, or check my email, am I “shoplifting”? If I install a pop-up blocker, am I shoplifting? If I walk into the cinema 20 minutes late and miss the ads and the previews, am I shoplifting? More importantly, if someone’s business model isn’t working, is that the consumer’s fault? I don’t think so, and I don’t think that’s what Peter intended to say, but I do think it’s the logical conclusion to that argument.

My personal view is that the point is moot; whether people agree or disagree that blocking or skipping ads (Tivo) is ethical, it is going to happen anyways: more, and more, and more. I think it will become common-place, to the point of ubiquity.

I don’t think the answer is to not use Tivo/other DVRs or not block ads, the answer is for websites and advertisers to not annoy people, not insult their intelligence, and not be obnoxious.

We all know of the ads that are so entertaining/funny/viral that they get spread around by word of mouth, and people willingly watch them and then tell all their friends to do the same.

I think advertising will have no choice but to attempt to practice that pattern; become more creative, entertaining, informative, or whatever.

We all like to laugh, to be entertained, to be informed. Nobody likes to be sold. We don’t mind being an audience, but we aren’t so taken with being a target market, a demographic unit, or a line-item in a marketing plan.

But What About The Children?

That aside, what about the ad-based business model? Good question. Well, what about the buggy-whip manufacturers? Before someone says that obsolete technology is not analogous to blocking ads, well — I don’t know about that. Technology is what makes blocking or skipping advertisements possible, and it’s no coincidence that as soon as most people are able to skip advertisements, they do.

If a business model starts to fail, do we halt what we’re doing and alter our behavior to suit that business model? By that logic, we all should have ordered stuff from Pets.com in 2000, just out of the kindness of our hearts, so they didn’t go out of business. The dot-com bust shouldn’t have happened, because we shouldn’t have let it happen, darn it! Why weren’t we there for their business model? How could we fail to support them?

No; I don’t think we should adapt to a business model. The business model adapts to the consumer, period.

If I start a business and fail to make money, I can’t go to my investors and try to tell them that my business model is fine, it’s just that the customers are not cooperating.

Again, my examples are approaching absurdity. But I think we’ve become so used to an advertising-based model that we may not see that it’s basically a one-sided contract. We never agreed, in the early days of radio and television, to watch advertisements in exchange for consuming news and entertainment — that was(is) just how it worked. To a large extent, that is still how it works, and I’m not against advertising, or that business model: not at all! In many/most cases, I think the model still works, and works well.

What I see, and what I’ve said before, is that as ad blocking/skipping becomes ubiquitous (and I still think that it will become ubiquitous), the business model will be forced to change. That’s not bad, wrong, unethical, immoral, or anything like that. It’s just change.

It may be disruptive, but, don’t we claim to like disruptive? Isn’t all innovation disruptive? Maybe not everyone sees a change in the advertising business model as “innovation”, but I’m not sure what else you’d call a change as large as the one I think is going to happen in the next ten years.

What do you think?