Smoot-Hawley on the web
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[Warning: little direct linguistic content.] Apple's decision to allow ad-blocking in iOS-9 (Eric Griffith, "Apple iOS 9 Ad-Blocking Explained (And Why It's a Bad Move", PC Magazine 6/11/2015) has caused a recent flurry of stories as iOS-9 has been rolled out. A few examples: Casey Johnston, "Welcome to the Block Party", The Awl 9/14/2015; Katie Benner & Sydney Ember, "Enabling of Ad Blocking in Apple’s iOS 9 Prompts Backlash", NYT 9/18/2015; Andrea Peterson & Brian Fung, "Why the maker of a chart-topping ad blocker just pulled it off the App Store", WaPo 9/18/2015; Philip Elmer-DeWitt, "Let the iOS 9 ad block wars begin!", Fortune 9/20/2015; Jasper Jackson, "Can publishers stop the ad blocking wave?", The Guardian 9/20/2015; "Will Ad-Blocking Millennials Destroy Online Publishing Or Save It?", Forbes 9/20/2015.
Most of the discussion is about the effect on publishers, especially smaller ones who are less likely to negotiate special deals to feature their content on Facebook or Apple News (whose internal ad-serving facilities will remain unblockable for now). But there's also some discussion that sees these issues as part of a struggle among hi-tech elephants, which helps to explain the motivations and thus the actions of the major players. Thus Nilay Patel, "Welcome to hell: Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook and the slow death of the web", The Verge 9/17/2015:
You might think the conversation about ad blocking is about the user experience of news, but what we're really talking about is money and power in Silicon Valley. And titanic battles between large companies with lots of money and power tend to have a lot of collateral damage. […]
Now, here's the thing about the web, and in particular web ads: the biggest provider of ads on the web is Google. […]
And with iOS 9 and content blockers, what you're seeing is Apple's attempt to fully drive the knife into Google's revenue platform. iOS 9 includes a refined search that auto-suggests content and that can search inside apps, pulling content away from Google and users away from the web, it allows users to block ads, and it offers publishers salvation in the form of Apple News, inside of which Apple will happily display (unblockable!) ads, and even sell them on publishers' behalf for just a 30 percent cut.
Oh, and if you're not happy with Apple News, you can always turn to Facebook's Instant Articles, which will also track the shit out of you and serve unblockable ads inside of the Facebook app, but from Apple's perspective it's a win as long as the money's not going to Google.
This evokes for me the Smoot-Hawley tariff act of 1930, about which Wikipedia says that
The great majority of economists then and ever since view the Act, and the ensuing retaliatory tariffs by America's trading partners, as responsible for reducing American exports and imports by more than half.
Patel's argument is that the attempts by Apple and Facebook (and Amazon and etc.) to keep Google's ads (and indexing) from crossing their borders might have a similar effect on the internet economy, or at least on the part of it that deals with content creation.
So is there any alternative to the current battle of elephants between increasingly intrusive and annoying and even dangerous ads on the open web, and whatever similarly toxic creatures will evolve in the Walled Gardens run by Apple and Facebook and a few others?
Charles Stross, "A question about the future of the world wide web", 9/18/2015:
There were two contenders for the funding mechanism in the early days: micro-billing (in which you pay pennies, fractional or otherwise, for access to web pages) and advertising (in which the page is nominally free but you pay the bandwidth overheads of downloading someone else's idea of what they want you to see). Advertising won out because in the long-ago era of modem-based downloads micro-billing was expensive […]
So we ended up with banner ads and spam, and then by a hop, skip and a jump today's hideously bloated ecosystem of ad exchanges, trackers, ghost cookies, third-party javascripts that download megabytes of libraries to figure out who you are and who is willing to pay the most for a few seconds in front of your eyeballs … and so on. […]
[T]o those of us who earn our crust from writing without ads, and who pay the atrocious bandwidth and performance bills imposed by the advertisers, it looks like the current state of the ad-funded web is a death-spiral and a race to the bottom. Casual information consumers won't pay for access to paywalled sites, and a lot of the struggling/bottom-feeding resources on the web are engaged in a zero-sum game for access to the same eyeballs that are increasingly irritated by the clickbait and attention-grabbing excesses of the worst advertisers. Anyway, this leads to my question: is there any way to get to a micro-billing infrastructure from where we are today that doesn't involve burning down the web and starting again from scratch?
There was an interesting panel on this topic a dozen years ago, worth reading (again?) now — "Does Anyone Really Need Micropayments?", featuring Andrew Odlyzko, Ron Rivest, Tim Jones, and Duncan Goldie-Scott, and published here. Andrew expanded on his contribution to that panel in "The case against micropayments" (2003) which argues that:
Micropayments are the technology of the future, and always will be. This was said about gallium arsenide (GaAs) over a decade ago, and has proven to be largely accurate. Although GaAs has found some niche applications (especially in high frequency communications), silicon continues to dominate the semiconductor industry.
The fate of micropayments is likely to be similar to that of gallium arsenide. They may become widespread eventually, but only after a long incubation period. They are also likely to play only a minor role in the economy. The reasons differ from the ones for the disappointments with GaAs. GaAs is playing a minor role because of technology trends. Silicon has improved faster than had been expected, and GaAs more slowly. On the other hand, the obstacles to micropayment adoption have very little to do with technology, and are rooted in economics, sociology, and psychology. Known micropayment schemes appear more than adequate in terms of providing low cost operations and adequate security. What is missing are convincing business cases.
Does the current ad-blocking crisis change the economics, sociology, and psychology of micropayment schemes?
Dick Margulis said,
September 21, 2015 @ 6:28 am
I see an analogy in television.
What we call the Internet (or what we sticklers for capitalizing proper nouns call the Internet and what everyone else calls the internet) probably should have been called Internet 1, which would make the argument for capitalization more transparent. There is already an Internet 2, which seems to fit the GaAs model.
If we think of Internet 1 as analogous to network television and Internet 2 as analogous to educational television (ETV, which, if memory serves, began as broadcast UHF channels and predates cable), then we might be looking forward to a micropayment-supported Internet 3, analogous to cable, where people initially paid for static-free, ad-free service rather than accepting the lower-transmission-quality, ad-laden, but free network broadcasts. That cable channels now carry commercials suggests that advertisers will find a way to infiltrate and eventually dominate Internet 3 as they do Internet 1, but maybe there's a way to fend them off for a while if people are willing to pay enough for content.
GeorgeW said,
September 21, 2015 @ 6:46 am
There is so much to be said about this subject (annoying, intrusion, distracting ads, snooping, cyber stalking, etc.). In any event, I am pleased that Apple has opened the discussion in a real, tangible way whether for vindictive reasons (getting Google) or more high-minded privacy concerns.
Ben Zimmer said,
September 21, 2015 @ 9:41 am
Also known as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which sounds even less euphonious.
D.O. said,
September 21, 2015 @ 10:05 am
I always thought that the abundance of cookies, trackers or whatever is the correct word for the garbage you allow to be installed on your computer in exchange for viewing the page you want is, well, that you agree to the exchange. If the price of viewing the page you want is to allow Google to enter your devise than Apple blocking this possibility will only enrage users. The trouble with Smoot-Hawley Act is that individual consumer could not possibly trash the government and choose another one if they wanted foreign goods.
[(myl) The concern is that "the page you want" might not exist, or you might not learn about it.]
D.O. said,
September 21, 2015 @ 10:36 am
The concern is that "the page you want" might not exist, or you might not learn about it.
Probably, I am missing something or not understanding how the internet works, but I thought normally you type into the search engine "most beautiful girls in Arizona" or "that fat governor of newjersey tax plan" or something like that and select the page you want to read. Or you follow the link on somebody's page. Or follow the links from a news aggregator. You are not suggesting that Apple will track whether the links on pages you are "allowed" to view will display the ads from Google and eliminate the links themselves?
[(myl) If enough view the page through a browser or app that blocks ads, and if the page is on a site that depends on ads for its revenue stream, and if the site doesn't find another business model, then the site (and the page) will cease to exist.]
Rose Eneri said,
September 21, 2015 @ 10:46 am
Continuing with Dick Margulis' TV analogy, on-line ad blocking is no different from recording TV content to watch later while fast-forwarding past the ads (the only way I watch TV) and TV has survived this.
If advertisers don't want their ads blocked, fast-forwarded or otherwise ignored they shouldn't make them obnoxious in the first place. I think the market place does reward quality ads. My husband and I go out of our way to watch clever, entertaining ads, such as the State Farm ad with the husband talking to his agent in the middle of the night and his wife "catching" him.
Of course, the people to blame for intrusive, distasteful ads are those who respond to them.
Linda said,
September 21, 2015 @ 10:53 am
I'm willing to believe that no one has written a page about handsome men in Arizona, but I am concerned that a search for that might give me pages of men in Alabama while purporting to be able to find anything on Arizona, just because Alabama has given bigger bribes.
Googling for images for advent candles a couple of years ago gave totally different images when I googled in England than when a friend googled in Germany.
Ginger Yellow said,
September 21, 2015 @ 12:02 pm
the price of viewing the page you want is to allow Google to enter your devise than Apple blocking this possibility will only enrage users.
Apple isn't blocking anything. It's allowing users to download one of many third party apps, if they actively choose to do so, that blocks ads from appearing in iOS Safari. That's it. If users don't download the apps, nothing changes for them. Well, unless the sites themselves go out of business as myl suggests.
J. W. Brewer said,
September 21, 2015 @ 1:19 pm
The incumbents in this sort of industry tend to see any incremental change away from whatever they've become accustomed to as a mortal threat, but their crystal balls are not invariably accurate. I guess the famous example is how the major "content providers" (as we'd now call them) 30+ years ago thought the Sony Betamax would destroy their revenue model and thus the incentives to produce new content, when it actually turned out that the VCR created new revenue streams and a quite profitable ensuing few decades for those same content providers — until further technological changes really did start to do some serious damage.
Richard Hershberger said,
September 21, 2015 @ 1:59 pm
@ Rose Eneri
"I think the market place does reward quality ads."
I quite enjoy the "Most Interesting Man in the World" Dos Equis ads. On the other hand, my blood sugar doesn't allow for frequent beer drinking. When I do indulge, I go for better beer than Dos Equis (which, in fairness, isn't bad: it merely is just OK).
Mark said,
September 21, 2015 @ 3:46 pm
Based on what I have read, it is not Apple itself that will do the ad blocking. According to this site (http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/08/03/what-the-ad-blocker-debate-reveals/), Apple will allow app developers to offer such capability. That may be a small difference, but it is a real difference.
Also, I think Rose Eneri's point is valid. If I recall correctly, when VCRs became widely available, broadcast TV didn't want viewers to be allowed to record network shows because they would fast-forward through commercials, thus destroying the networks' ability to make money through ads. That didn't happen, and i doubt that it will happen with ad blockers.
Maybe ad blockers can help level the playing field for content consumers. Now the providers and their advertisers have the upper hand in the transaction.
Rubrick said,
September 21, 2015 @ 4:43 pm
Oversimplifying, I'd say there are three basic revenue models for small online content publishers. The first is advertising, which users hate and which usually doesn't generate sufficient revenue to sustain the site anyway. The second is paywalls, which users also hate and which also usually doesn't generate sufficient revenue to sustain the site.
The third is a combination of direct merchandising of site-related items (T-shirts, prints, books, etc.) and/or voluntary donations. This one has actually worked rather well for a number of online content creators (e.g. Homestar Runner, xkcd, Dinosaur Comics, and, getting far from the "small" designation, Wikipedia). Notably, it omits the "users hate it" part.
My money (figuratively and literally) is on this last option. Donations, in particular, show remarkable promise; it turns out that people who really like something are often willing to pay for it even if they don't have to, tragedy of the commons be damned.
Chris C. said,
September 21, 2015 @ 5:51 pm
It's the incredible intrusiveness of ads that have driven me to block them. On Yahoo specifically, which is where I get much of my news these days. It only takes a few occurrences of a large unskippable video blocking my view of whatever I want to read, which takes at least a minute to download before it even begins playing, to drive me to the loving arms of ABP.
Imagine if you opened a newspaper and instead of a collection of ads taking up column inches you found nothing BUT ads, with no news available to read unless you spent a set amount of time perusing them all first. That's what it was like for me without ad blocking.
Google's old style text ads work largely because they're not intrusive, and are usually relevant to my interests. (Not sure about the tense there because I'm no longer clear which of the ads I might be either seeing or blocking are served up by a Google/Alphabet company.)
Chris C. said,
September 21, 2015 @ 5:57 pm
I meant to add — Micropayments seem to have come to the fore in the online gaming world, where a game itself might be free to play but various add-ons to enhance the gaming experience can be had for a few pennies here and there. Many other content providers operate on a kind of subscription model. On Twitch, for instance, many streamers operate on a voluntary subscription model where subscribers may or may not gain access to additional site features. This is occasionally augmented by merchandise sales.
MikeA said,
September 21, 2015 @ 6:55 pm
Wandering off topic a bit, but GaAs was pretty much supplanted by SiGe heterojunction for those cases where one or the other is needed. Not only did SiGe ramp up amazingly fast from lab to production, but it could be made on very slightly modified CMOS fab lines. Those are obviously related, in that easy fabrication promotes more experimentation that leads to rapid progress.
Wandering back on topic, the infrastructure that currently allows your TV to record everything you say in your house, and Windows 10 to log every click and send it to Redmond, seems to my (non expert) eyes to have enough "juice" to make micropayments work. They could hardly be _more_ intrusive.
And as others have noted, things like Patreon seem to work for content sites that actually have (original) content.
Rodger C said,
September 21, 2015 @ 8:00 pm
@Linda: Well, Anglican and Roman Catholic Advent candles are different. I don't know which of them, if either, Lutheran candles agree with.
wallyw said,
September 21, 2015 @ 8:22 pm
My solution – which I like because of its ultimate simplicity, everyone else will probably hate (and MikeA hints at it) – is to have some entity monitor the page views or pages served or screen time of a page and pay the producer of that page proportionally. The money could be collected by monitoring someones usage per day, but since everyone has the same 24 hours each day to view, the charges could be the same for everyone – or proportional to income or wealth. If everyone is being charged for a nominal 24 hours, there is not much incentive to cheat, so there could be on device monitors that could be quite accurate. Some semblance of privacy could be achieved by aggregating and encrypting before usage data is sent. The biggest flaw may be that popularity is not necessarily proportional to quality or the amount of effort required. Finally, if payment is proportional to income, then payment can just be part of your taxes and more or less invisible. I am sure everyone will love the big government approach. (But note that any entity controlling what we can view will have a lot of power). Oh, and if we are basing this on monitoring eyeballs 24/7, we can extend it to TV – no ads – movies and other things.
Gregory Kusnick said,
September 22, 2015 @ 2:24 am
I'm skeptical of any scheme that relies on automated systems looking over my shoulder in order to decide who to pay. Not just because of the Big Brother aspect, but because what's on my screen at any given moment may be a poor proxy for what I'm actually willing to pay for, and taking the payment decision out of my hands makes it even poorer by creating incentives for providers to game the system by delaying page transitions, serving me pages I didn't ask for, or otherwise directing my eyeballs to their advantage rather than mine.
To avoid this sort of exploit, I don't think there's any substitute for having consumers themselves decide how they want their payments allocated. Consumers who are willing to delegate that decision to some tracking algorithm shouldn't expect much improvement, since that's more or less what we have now.
Adam F said,
September 22, 2015 @ 4:03 am
Rubrick wrote: The third is a combination of direct merchandising of site-related items (T-shirts, prints, books, etc.) and/or voluntary donations. This one has actually worked rather well for a number of online content creators (e.g. Homestar Runner, xkcd, Dinosaur Comics, and, getting far from the "small" designation, Wikipedia). Notably, it omits the "users hate it" part.
That works for me. I don't buy everything that every web comic I like sells, but I have collected all the PhD and Yehuda Moon books (even though all the content is on-line), most of the Calvin & Hobbes books, & bought various other things.
(My son like the PhD Comics books, but I assured him that my boss is not at all like Professor Smith.)
Adam F said,
September 22, 2015 @ 4:05 am
(Apologies if someone has pulled this out of the Obvious Bag already.)
I see there are a lot of articles under "Uncategorized" — doesn't that make it a category? (When a plaque beside a painting says "Untitled", could that be the title? How can you tell?)
TomParmenter said,
September 25, 2015 @ 5:08 pm
My AdblockPlus has blocked nearly 20,000 ads since Labor Day and more than 250,000 since I clicked on it. I have exempted three sites from ad blocking. They all asked politely and none of them had more than a single ad to be blocked. I do not feel deprived.
I went for ad-blocking because I didn't like the ads that were piggy-backing on ads that I had previously viewed.