Ads on the Internet

Let's talk about ads. They're literally everywhere. You see them on the streets, on TV, they're on the radio and they're even on the internet. They range from memetic to just plain annoying and in your face.

The Background

This isn't an entirely uneducated rant. I'm a curious person, and since a few weeks ago, I'm working in what's called "internet marketing." In layman's terms: Putting those nasty ads on websites. Yes, I'm kind of on the dark side. Also, I'm quite new, so I haven't seen that much of the tech behind it.

Internet marketing involves a lot of douchebaggery. Not against the people who get the ads, but against each other. There's lots of trickery involved as to how you get ads out while at the same time stopping others from having theirs displayed. Also, circumventing ad-blockers. But that shouldn't really be that new to you. It's business, after all.

Why I'm Writing This

I admit, it's largely due to the whole "please don't block our ads" thing that's going on lately. And, no, this is not propaganda. I don't earn money if I get people to turn off their ad-blockers. I earn money for programming. But... these people have a point. They are getting money ("revenue") for each person who watches an ad in their videos.

Who Gets Money?

That said, I'm not all against ad-blockers. It's just about who gets the money. There's lots of free web hosts that put up ads on their customer's pages. These ads don't benefit the owner of the page, they benefit the owner of the web host. Ads like Project Wonderful, or AdSense or however these things are called, are different. They're revenue ads, earning the page owner money for display/clicks. Sure, some of that revenue goes to the ad company itself, but then, that's how they earn their money and allow people to put ads on their pages to earn money.

Ad Myths

Yes, of course there's myths on internet ads. I'm not sure how widespread the things I've heard are, but I've heard them, which means that they go on this list.

All ads are evil: No. That's broad generalization. An ad, in general, is just as evil as the people who provide it. I can only speak for myself here, but the part of the ad chain I'm in does not want people to be redirected to porn sites. That's bad PR and leads to people blocking you because yes, your ads are evil and so are you.
Then, there's technological possibilities. There's ads that are displayed in so-called iframes. They're effectively another page in the current page, so that offers a lot of possibilities for code to be executed. Then, there's ads like the ones  Project Wonderful uses. I don't know what their ad fetch PHP script does, but the ad you eventually get out of it is a picture with a link to the page and a link that lets you advertise in this slot. Sure, you could try to inject malicious code into a picture, but if you're good enough to do that, you should consider earning legal money with that.


You can make it so the blocked ad still counts: That one came up in the Blip discussion. I don't know who said it, but I'd like to ask that person one thing: How would you know that? Aside from this being fraud, technically, how would one know? Stuff like checking if the ad is displayed is usually done deep in the code. If you know how to cheat the ad counter, you have to be really in the know about the code. And if you are, you probably signed an NDA and are thus violating your contract. Have fun.

The people don't get money anyways: I talked about that already. See above.

To Block or Not To Block

There's a few things I block, and a few I don't.
Dubious ad providers - Block: These are the ones that try and redirect you to porn or worse. If you're using one of them for ads, it's your fault, because I sure as hell don't need malware on my computer.
Pop-Ups - Block: I don't care if they're revenue ads or not. Pop-ups are annoying, and if you willingly put one on your site, it's your fault.
Revenue ads - No Block: These are the ads that earn the owners of websites money. They're an indirect way to pay them for their service.

How to Get Unblocked by me

I'll try and unblock people who earn money through ads, but you guys need to help me a bit. Here's the things you should put up somewhere for people to see:

Tell us you get money through these ads: Because if you do, non-douchebag people will be glad to unblock and support you.
Tell us what to whitelist: Most of the time, ads come from some third party ad provider. I, as the person with the ad-blocker, need to know which provider that is. I need an URL to feed to my ad-blocker's whitelist. If you don't know, try to find out. You're allowing someone to embed stuff in your page, so you should know who that somebody is.
Tell us how to whitelist: Not everybody's technologically literate to use ad-blockers past the standard configuration. Link to tutorials, or explain, how to whitelist a page in the most common ad-blockers.

And Finally...

Even though I have name-dropped two companies extensively, I'm not trying to advertise for them. I used Blip as an example because it's a big thing, and Project Wonderful because I had a look at their stuff and it looks good.

And to those who get ad revenue: You're not selling out. You're getting paid, albeit indirectly. And there's nothing wrong with getting paid.

On Criticism and Soup

I don't know if you've heard about it, but there's these people who respond to negative (never positive!) criticism on something with "Do it better!" or "You've never created a [thing], how would you know anything?"

Judging the Soup

These statements imply that, in order to be able to criticize things, you need to have done/created them. I call bull on that, and will now bring the eponymous soup into play. I'm not a cook. I know how to cook noodles and make generic Asia style food. And I can put things on toast. But does this stop me from judging the food I get at a restaurant? No. I can tell if the soup tastes like hot water, and I can damn well tell if my Schnitzel is raw on the inside. I may not be able to tell you how much of what spice is missing, or how long it should have been cooked, but I know damn well that there's something not working with my food. I may not be a cook, but I'm an eater. I've had my fair share of food and I can tell if something tastes good. For things I've had more often, I can even tell what's wrong with it. In a nutshell, yes, I can judge the soup.

I want to see you do it better!

I'm very compelled to reply to that statement with STFU. It's closely related to an eater's ability to judge the soup, but there's more to it. Let's say you are a cook. You can tell what the soup lacks, and how long you have to cook things until they're al dente. Still, there's that other thing that will be thrown at you: You've never gone public/aren't a professional. I'll drop the allegory here and return to the thing that inspired me to write this post: "You don't know how much work it is to make a game. I want to see you make a better one." Aside from the fact that you don't need to be a game designer to see a game's faults... You guys, who write stuff like that under Youtube videos, do you have any idea how much time goes into making a good game? Do you know how much experience one has to gather before being able to make games as good as you want them to be? Alot. (Sorry, there was no good picture of an alot in a TARDIS.) Going back to the cooking analogy: Just because you can't cook a fancy meal, that doesn't stop you from using your knowledge to give a detailed critique of it.

The Pointless Point

Well, I'm pretty sure I won't stop these people from demanding you write a book before you call one crap, or make a game, despite all the experience needed to make a good one. But that doesn't mean that people who don't have these "qualifications" should listen to them. After all, if consumers couldn't criticize things, where would we be?

I will now step down from my soapbox. Thank you very much.