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Improving online advertising through product and infrastructure | The Mozilla Blog
(blog.mozilla.org)
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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I'm honestly not against this. I know a lot of people will be furious with Mozilla about doing anything related to advertising, but as the article says:
We may dislike ads, but the vast majority of internet users are not going to engage with content that requires you to pay up front. Creators and journalists need money to survive, and currently, ad-supported viewing is necessary for that to happen.
Instead of just hoping that advertising somehow goes away, I'm glad that Mozilla is working on ways for ads to exist without mass individual user tracking. I wish it wasn't necessary, but wishing won't change the world.
I don't mind simple static ads on websites as a way to keep them free to use. The reason I use an ad blocker is because websites use ads that flash, play video/audio, and dynamically resize causing the text you are trying to read to jump around and change, making the site unusable. Even with an adblocker, sometimes the only way to use those sites is with reader mode. I disable the adblocker on sites that display reasonable, mostly static advertising. People putting in the work to make the content deserve to eat.
The sane way is to allow all sites only to load the main HTML document. Sites that get return visits and have earned some trust get to have their CSS loaded.
You will never see another advertisement "jump around" again
I use uMatrix btw
So you browse the web without css? Now that’s old school!
There was another model of sorts in "scroll" but they got acquired by Twitter and ... Who knows if that technology will ever get used again.
The scroll model was that you pay $5/mo or so and the Internet becomes ad free (at least for sites that had a relationship with scroll). The money you paid got shared with the sites you visited based on your relative usage (and of course scroll kept some for themselves too).
If Mozilla brought something like that back to the table, I could get on board.
With all due respect, Mozilla is now (and, for a while, has been) an ad company. When an ad company tells you ads are necessary, you should not trust them. Plenty of lousy things have been entrenched as social norms, but it is the job of the entrenchers to justify their existence... Which Mozilla is definitely not doing here.
The only way out of this is to block advertising. I, personally, think that you should not have a website if you can't pay for it yourself, but the only acceptable kind of website income is a paywall. If you just have "better advertising", advertising will never go away. And I hate ads.
Consider this: every website where you block ads is now inaccessible to you. How did that belief work out?
You might want to consider how expensive web hosting can be, depending on the content and traffic. A belief like that can shut out a huge portion of the world from being able to even bother with a web site. Even a simple blog can get very expensive due to traffic. Maybe not expensive enough for your average 1st world individual... But that still excludes a large portion of the population with internet access.
So? Is anyone who can’t afford one legally obliged to have a website?
No, but if its prohibitively impossible to do so, people with legitimate good ideas will never be able to do anything about it. Barriers to entry only serve the wealthy.