Google terminates AdBlock Plus AdSense account

[Doobeedoo]

I used Adguard though now I'm using Operas integrated add blocking.

[ADM-Ntek]

my main problem with adds is Bandwidth. i simply don´t have the bandwidth especially if the ads need more than the rest of the site. i don´t mind the odd little pic like her on the forum but things like video ads are just insane i can just barely watch 480p video if i now had to also allow the ads i could even forget bout that. 

[PianoPlayer88Key]

I'm not against unintrusive ads, but when they start threatening to enroach on system/network resources in a measurable way, that's when I think they've gone too far.

 

I'd like a way to limit ads that come in on my connection, not just based on content, but on technical details, like resources consumed.  For example...

 

It should take a 1959-vintage PDP-1 computer (or an original 4-function calculator, whichever has less resources) a lower percentage of system resources to display the ad, than it takes the 93-PFLOP Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer to run 

10 PRN "Hi"
20 HLT

And, the network resources to serve/receive the ads should be the smaller of either 10^-384% of the total bandwidth, or one company's stock ticker symbol (in the most efficiently-compressed plain text format possible) per week, when the internet connection saturates the PCI-E lanes in all 32,000 Xeon E5-2692 CPUs in the Tianhe-2.

 

Having ads that play several hundred MB worth of video, especially when your system only has 2 GB RAM (like my parents' laptop), is using WAAAYY too high of a percentage of resources!

[dalekphalm]

19 minutes ago, Mark77 said:

 

I see lots of evidence that consumers are largely 'tapped out', and will be entering a period of significant austerity as debt comes due and interest rates inevitably rise.  Advertising is an expensive 'frill'.  Companies have relentlessly chopped their expenses in producing consumer goods, through outsourcing, and offshoring.  Advertising is one of the future areas they will need to cut back on to be more competitive since there isn't really a lot of fat to cut elsewhere.  

 

No, it wouldn't have to be international at all.

 

For instance, at home, you probably have an Internet connection with 1 ISP.  You download 200gb/month.  You probably upload 10gb/month.  You would thus pay a fee for 190GB of imbalance in addition to the monthly connection fee to keep the line alive. 

 

Your ISP probably has connections with 3-5 other ISPs, in addition to its customer base.  The ISP would pay (or receive) fees based on traffic imbalance between its connectees. 

 

And so on and so forth.  So the incentive would be for ISPs to sponsor content creation, and/or to encourage their customers to not run such severe imbalances. 

 

Of course, a site like LTT inherently runs an imbalance, but in the other direction, as an uploader.  So if LTT was hosted at an ISP, the ISP would collect payments from its peers, and in turn, make big payments to LTT.  Since LTT has a lot of video and since video is very bandwidth-intensive, the payments could be very large. 

 

Because the system is distributed, there's no big "Google" to be involved, taking their skim off the top.  Content creators and infrastructure builders would make a lot more money, instead of the leeches at the ad companies who create nothing of value but consume bandwidth, and keep a lot of money for themselves.

 

No, you're really only exchanging traffic with your ISP.  You don't have a physical connection anywhere else. 

There are so many problems with this system. You're trading one bad system for another bad system.

 

First off, ISP's already have issues with users using a lot of bandwidth. Many places try to charge per usage used, and institute bandwidth caps with huge overage fees.

 

This will incentivise them to get you to pay even more by going over your bandwidth fee.

 

ISP's also don't make any distinction between uploads and downloads. To them, it's still "traffic over my network". Many ISP's will charge you for overages, whether those overages come from uploads or downloads.

 

Furthermore, this system doesn't promote value, it just promotes uploading. I could upload Terabytes of data, but that doesn't mean that data has any value. This would also likely kill any free Cloud Storage systems.

 

It's a neat idea, but it's not practical at all. I really can't see anyone being interested in investing in the infrastructure to make this work,.

[soup]

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

 public transport dont directly lose any money by you being there while being ticketless,

oh yes it does, they have to use more fuel to move your weight(else an empty bus and a full bus would use the same fuel) there is more stress and strain on suspension tyres etc and there is more wear on the seats.  None of which they get paid for if you are ticketless

[manikyath]

Just now, soup said:

oh yes it does, they have to use more fuel to move your weight(else an empty bus and a full bus would use the same fuel) there is more stress and strain on suspension tyres etc and there is more wear on the seats

windows' servers are under higher load when you run windows

 

but generally, what you mentioned can be relativated (in belgium at least) since the majority of public transport users have a subscription for 1-12 months, they could in theory be on a train/bus for the entire duration of their subscription, but in most cases they aent

[dalekphalm]

2 minutes ago, manikyath said:

windows' servers are under higher load when you run windows

 

but generally, what you mentioned can be relativated (in belgium at least) since the majority of public transport users have a subscription for 1-12 months, they could in theory be on a train/bus for the entire duration of their subscription, but in most cases they aent

In North America, many people tend to buy tickets individually or in strips (5 tickets at a time, etc). When I did use the bus, I saw a pretty even distribution of people with monthly passes, and people with individual tickets/cash payment. Also, here, the longest pass you can get is 1 month (Not counting special deals like Colleges and Universities, as they negotiate their own special prices).

[PocketNerd]

2 hours ago, SamStrecker said:

Just makes ads nice and no on will use adblockers. The forum ad is very nice and scales with the website. All this popup, auto play, non scaling stuff is what drives me insane

I just turned my AdBlocker off to see what ads were like on this site, which is quite a shocker. One small, unobtrusive ad that doesn't make navigation difficult or break the overall layout of the site.

I'm keeping adblocker off just for you Linus!

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

In North America, many people tend to buy tickets individually or in strips (5 tickets at a time, etc). When I did use the bus, I saw a pretty even distribution of people with monthly passes, and people with individual tickets/cash payment. Also, here, the longest pass you can get is 1 month (Not counting special deals like Colleges and Universities, as they negotiate their own special prices).

well, things are different on this side of the pond appareantly

 

if you need to do more than 5 trips to the same place, its already worth just getting a month pass in a lot of cases, and in terms of bus, a 3-month "go anywhere" bus ticket costs as much as 20 individual rides, i'll let you do the math on that one

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

well, things are different on this side of the pond appareantly

 

if you need to do more than 5 trips to the same place, its already worth just getting a month pass in a lot of cases, and in terms of bus, a 3-month "go anywhere" bus ticket costs as much as 20 individual rides, i'll let you do the math on that one

Oh for sure, if you use the bus daily, it's always cheaper to have a monthly pass.

 

But lots of people who use the bus are poor, and they can't afford the upfront cost (even if it's relatively cheap). Bus passes cost around $75 CAD per month now for a monthly pass, where I live. In some places, like Toronto, the monthly price is over $100 I believe. Though Toronto has several different ways to get passes.

[Dabombinable]

1 minute ago, PocketNerd said:

I just turned my AdBlocker off to see what ads were like on this site, which is quite a shocker. One small, unobtrusive ad that doesn't make navigation difficult or break the overall layout of the site.

I'm keeping adblocker off just for you Linus!

LTT actually makes an effort to make money off ads while keeping users happy.

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, Dabombinable said:

LTT actually makes an effort to make money off ads while keeping users happy.

And honestly, if more people followed suit, Ads would not be an issue at all.

 

I think it's only a matter of time before the EU or another country decides to implement some Regulation on online advertisement, and set punishment for making intrusive/terrible ads.

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Oh for sure, if you use the bus daily, it's always cheaper to have a monthly pass.

 

But lots of people who use the bus are poor, and they can't afford the upfront cost (even if it's relatively cheap). Bus passes cost around $75 CAD per month now for a monthly pass, where I live. In some places, like Toronto, the monthly price is over $100 I believe. Though Toronto has several different ways to get passes.

here actually a lot of the low income people have the bus pass, because it is just so cheap, and if you cant afford a car (and even when you can, actually...) it is surprisingly practical to just be able to hop on the bus, go wherever, and step back off.

[Mark77]

Quote

Furthermore, this system doesn't promote value, it just promotes uploading. I could upload Terabytes of data, but that doesn't mean that data has any value. This would also likely kill any free Cloud Storage systems.

If nobody wants your uploads, then who exactly would you be able to upload to?  Hence, you'd have to produce useful uploads, that people are willing to pay for.  Which is the whole point.  A website like LTT is a prolific uploader, but downloads very little.  So they, along with content creators, would be compensated quite nicely, ie: they'd be on the receiving end of imbalance payments. 

 

People wanting to increase the amount of stuff they upload could, for example, run a virtual machine with a self-contained Netflix server.   Or a bittorrent server.  Or provide some other sort of useful service to the Internet.  Even Google would make good money since they are a huge uploader with YouTube (although they'd probably have to pass on some to those people who upload in-demand content to YouTube!). 

 

edit:  as a side benefit, there would be *enormous* incentive to re-jig the IP protocols to be more secure and to provide meaningful DOS/DDOS protection under such a model.  Basically if they don't do something about DDOS vulnerability, the Internet faces an existential crisis sooner or later. 

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, dalekphalm said:

And honestly, if more people followed suit, Ads would not be an issue at all.

 

I think it's only a matter of time before the EU or another country decides to implement some Regulation on online advertisement, and set punishment for making intrusive/terrible ads.

we can only hope. at some point i was on dailymotion, my video slid down off the screen, stopped (not paused, full stop like dont remember where it left off) to fullscreen the video ad that was making up the background of the browser window.

 

i'd make it very easy:

- no autoplay video ads

- no sounds

- no ads that try to mimic the page's purpose (fake download buttons, etc.)

[GeekPower0]

2 minutes ago, Mark77 said:

If nobody wants your uploads, then who exactly would you be able to upload to?  Hence, you'd have to produce useful uploads, that people are willing to pay for.  Which is the whole point.  A website like LTT is a prolific uploader, but downloads very little.  So they, along with content creators, would be compensated quite nicely, ie: they'd be on the receiving end of imbalance payments. 

 

People wanting to increase the amount of stuff they upload could, for example, run a virtual machine with a self-contained Netflix server.   Or a bittorrent server.  Or provide some other sort of useful service to the Internet.  

So essentially, I could publish a 24/7 1080p stream to Twitch in order to get internet for free...

[dalekphalm]

Just now, manikyath said:

here actually a lot of the low income people have the bus pass, because it is just so cheap, and if you cant afford a car (and even when you can, actually...) it is surprisingly practical to just be able to hop on the bus, go wherever, and step back off.

Yep - that's Europe for ya.

 

Here in most cities? If you don't have a car, there are simply large sections of town (especially places on the outskirts) where you cannot go. Many cities have terrible Transit.

 

Toronto has excellent transit, although it's expensive. And it still takes forever to get anywhere, since the city is so damn big.

 

My City has good transit too - no subway system, so not quite as expansive as Toronto's, but it's still rather robust. But it's definitely not perfect.

 

2 minutes ago, Mark77 said:

If nobody wants your uploads, then who exactly would you be able to upload to?  Hence, you'd have to produce useful uploads, that people are willing to pay for.  Which is the whole point.  A website like LTT is a prolific uploader, but downloads very little.  So they, along with content creators, would be compensated quite nicely, ie: they'd be on the receiving end of imbalance payments. 

 

People wanting to increase the amount of stuff they upload could, for example, run a virtual machine with a self-contained Netflix server.   Or a bittorrent server.  Or provide some other sort of useful service to the Internet.  Even Google would make good money since they are a huge uploader with YouTube. 

That might be true for their YouTube channel, but that's nothing of the sort for their Forums. LTT itself uploads very little to the forums, aside from the base software and graphics that they used to create the layout. If anything, the forum users themselves upload FAR MORE content, in the form of picture attachments, etc.

 

Your solution is creative, I'll give you that, but I strongly feel like it's not a great solution. We can fix the issues with ads without resorting to something like that, totally redesigning the very fabric of how we access the internet. It would require at least as much time and money to create your proposed system as it would to simply institute regulatory bodies that would manage the rules around what ads are acceptable.

 

Obviously these bodies would have no control over fishy shady ad networks that operate in countries with little online laws, but the biggest ad networks, like AdSense, would be forced to comply easily. Not to mention that there were already talks about how Google might start to reduce your Search Ranking if your site uses shitty/obtrusive ads.

[Mark77]

Quote

So essentially, I could publish a 24/7 1080p stream to Twitch in order to get internet for free...

 

Yup.  But Twitch would have to accept such a stream.  If Twitch couldn't re-stream it to at least 1 other users (ie: create a corresponding upload to offset their download of your upload), they'd have an imbalance. 

 

But if Twitch could take, say, your 1 stream, and stream it out to 1000 users, then they'd make a fortune.   Instead of basically being minimally, if not completely unprofitable.  And hoping that whoever advertises through Twitch actually renews their advertising budget for the next quarter. 

[GeekPower0]

2 minutes ago, Mark77 said:

 

Yup.  But Twitch would have to accept such a stream.  If Twitch couldn't re-stream it to at least 1 other users (ie: create a corresponding upload to offset their download of your upload), they'd have an imbalance. 

 

But if Twitch could take, say, your 1 stream, and stream it out to 1000 users, then they'd make a fortune. 

Actually, no. They would just need one overall viewer per stream. So there could be 300 streams on one Twitch IP address, 299 of those could be junk, as long as there are over 300 people watching the one good stream they would break even. 

[BuckGup]

26 minutes ago, PocketNerd said:

I just turned my AdBlocker off to see what ads were like on this site, which is quite a shocker. One small, unobtrusive ad that doesn't make navigation difficult or break the overall layout of the site.

I'm keeping adblocker off just for you Linus!

You shouldn't be using it anyways. I just have a script that stops auto play ads and doesn't allow pop up ads.

[Mark77]

Quote

Actually, no. They would just need one overall viewer per stream. So there could be 300 streams on one Twitch IP address, 299 of those could be junk, as long as there are over 300 people watching the one good stream they would break even. 

 

Well "Twitch" would still have to recover its capital costs, the cost of keeping the connections alive, etc.  So I was including such in my estimates.  You're right though, if we assume that the cost of running Twitch is zero, and we're strictly talking about upload/download ratios.   Someone with a 1:1 download/upload ratio would basically pay nothing for their Internet other than the basic charge for the line. 

 

Another side benefit of this all is that you'd have all the content creators clamoring to offer the best formats possible.  4K.  8K.  Etc.   The neat thing about it all is that data measurements are protocol agnostic.  It doesn't matter whether you're downloading LTT, or Twitch, or some Ubuntu DVD -- all the uploaders get paid, no matter how they serve up the content, whether its through a web browser, ftp server, bittorrent client, etc. 

 

One way of thinking about it is like thinking about your power meter.  If you use a lot of electricity, you pay a lot more.  If you install solar panels and you generate more electricity than you use, then the electric company has to give you a rebate or a credit against your future use as your meter will spin backwards. 

[Misanthrope]

Totally called it again 

[soup]

9 hours ago, manikyath said:

 and if you cant afford a car (and even when you can, actually...) it is surprisingly practical to just be able to hop on the bus, go wherever, and step back off.

Where I am it is actually easier ,can be faster, and is cheaper to get into and out of town using the bus .  I live on the outskirts of a medievel town (Edinburgh) parking in it is HORRENDOUS and the roads are actually built (most of them) for horse and cart not cars .  The council is actually pretty anti car and actually have a few no car areas . The wider roads have what are termed bus lanes and buses can speed up and down them but cars are banned from them so buses can travel faster than the rest of the traffic .The bus service here is excellent (ten minutes between buses and we are right on the edge/outside depending on your viewpoint of Edinburgh in a village called Balerno) so there really is no point driving into town.

Spoiler

 

[as96]

As of now I'm using uBlock Origin, I find it more effective.

[Misanthrope]

11 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

There are so many problems with this system. You're trading one bad system for another bad system.

 

First off, ISP's already have issues with users using a lot of bandwidth. Many places try to charge per usage used, and institute bandwidth caps with huge overage fees.

 

This will incentivise them to get you to pay even more by going over your bandwidth fee.

 

ISP's also don't make any distinction between uploads and downloads. To them, it's still "traffic over my network". Many ISP's will charge you for overages, whether those overages come from uploads or downloads.

 

Furthermore, this system doesn't promote value, it just promotes uploading. I could upload Terabytes of data, but that doesn't mean that data has any value. This would also likely kill any free Cloud Storage systems.

 

It's a neat idea, but it's not practical at all. I really can't see anyone being interested in investing in the infrastructure to make this work,.

Actually that's not the problem: The problem is ISPs overselling their services far beyond their current capacity and giving customers fuckall in the way of infrastructure upgrades.

 

They really are behaving like greedy fucking banks at this point: they sell bandwidth they know damn well they wouldn't be able to serve, not even in bursts. They just rely on the fact that most customers aren't tech saavy to exploit said bandwidth but as consumers become more educated and services like videostreaming become more popular they enter the "Oh shit" period of their fractional reserve banking bandwidth