Nobody's talking about these being 'rights'. There are existing laws for privacy violations and 'peeping toms', there's absolutely no reason or need for heavy-handed over-regulation just because it's new technology. Everything in life can be used for good or for ill, they need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis, not just blanket-banning the entire industry just because of some politician's twisted mind.

Not just 'were', and not just 'in bed', but wild kinky shit. This is pretty much how the US legal system's relationship with big business has operated for years.

What? Of course the advertiser knows. Most decent ad networks do work with the site and the advertiser, who shapes the ad buy. I guess there are 'throw whatever on the page' ad networks, but I've never worked with them. I honestly don't know which one is more common....

But Alexa and Quantcast both require third-party cookies to be effective or accurate, which most people in this thread are advocating blocking wholesale.

Are you talking a pure content/journo site that's barely more than Wordpress? Then yes, costs are cheap.
There's more than one type of website/idea out there, though. Some exist to store, manipulate, and sort through large amounts of data for a large niche (sounds like an oxymoron, but in my personal case, I ran a site for a gaming community (niche part), but had 5 million users (large part, relatively speaking)).

Heavily CPU-bound and applications that transfer a lot of data (TB/mo) are going to cost money no matter if you're co-lo'ing or using some cloud service provider. According to their calculator, AWS costs ~$120/mo just for 1 TB of client-side output alone, nevermind the instances.

There's this weird assumption in these threads that the only sites ever created are cat blogs or political rants. I don't know if it's just general lack of experience with the web, or what. I can name several properties that can't operate on your assumed 'cable TV' budget.

And you don't think that presents a risk to those that are paying out the CPM? At least with an established, third-party network, their reputation stands on accurate reporting. If you're paying someone to share your message, are you just going to blindly trust that they started having a million uniques per day?

I guess if you're content with refusing to at least consider both sides of the discussion and thinking only your version of advertising is 'correct', then sure.... no hypocrisy.

Since you responded to literally nothing else from my post, I can only assume you aren't interested in actual discussion or debate on the topic, or simply cannot physically comprehend creating something that requires anything more than a static page or two (which would be ironic, given where we're communicating).

> I want to block their cookies. I want to deny them the analytics or even know that I visited the page. I want the advertisers to piss off and die.
> save your damned bandwidth, and leave the parasites out of the equation entirely.

This is extremely easy to do, and I'm not sure why you or others haven't suggested it:
You could not visit the site/page. The 100% bandwidth savings is worth it, wouldn't you say?

AC is right. Instead of 'running ads', you are the ad.

Also, you're assuming that every site exists to sell a specific product. In my case, I ran a pure service in which users (who are generally less-militant against ads for games, peripherals, and at least somewhat tolerant on "related" products like snack foods) could track and compare their progress on a popular gaming service.

I did it for fun initially, but the numbers I gave from my original post weren't pulled out of thin air; this actually happened. I needed hosting, I needed hardware, I needed consulting (because my DB modeling skills were terrible). While I actually did end up paying out of pocket for my hosting during its final year, I never could have scaled with demand without advertising. Being an uninterested third-party, it's easy to say "well your site didn't deserve to exist", but I am confident you would feel differently if it was your own blood and sweat at stake.

The point of all this is that not every site is equal. Not all of them are click-bait, copy-pasta "journalism", or someone's blog about their cat. There are many people out there doing labor-of-love projects that, for whatever reason, end up being useful for a number of people. Some of them have the ability to monetize them into products, like games and what have you, and others may make the end-user the product (Google, Twitter) - but there are others who may not have that ability. In many cases, advertising is simply the best and/or only business model that is viable. The web is vast; these sites deserve to exist, and there is room for them to do so.

Actively boycott those who you feel are taking advantage of its users (80 ads on a page, bad ad networks, etc), but don't damn the entire system. People willing to pay to get their message out has worked for hundreds, if not thousands of years. There's a huge difference between that, and 'punch the monkey' shit that started this 'war'.

[* Sorry for potentially putting words in anyone's mouths, I'm basically covering all the bases from every conversation I've had within ad-blocking threads on Slashdot - You can see my post history]

That's great that your own websites are 'crappy' enough that you can pay for them out of your own pocket.

What if one of them stops being crappy and ends up with 5 million users with millions of daily hits, and you suddenly have to get new hardware and support increased bandwidth expenditure? Are you going to continue to pay, say, $1,000 out of pocket to keep it up? Or would you rather kill it than supplant the costs with advertising?

Curious what your 'passionate' beef with DJI is. They have a ways to go, but they do a good job of making an all-around consumer-friendly device at an affordable cost.

If a couple of ads are 'locking your system' and 'using all CPU time', maybe you need CleanMyPC after all.
There's a hit, sure, but you're painting a picture that your system is a bigger bottleneck than a couple of Javascript calls.

Sure thing.

https://www.faa.gov/regulation...
Section 336

What world do you live in? It's extremely obvious that YOU don't know how networking (or the real world) works. Networking is a two-way street.

At nearly ANY provider (above a dime-a-dozen personal blog host), a customer absolutely pays for bandwidth usage. Sometimes they give you a little for "free" - but it's still metered, and you're still paying for some sort of account. And of course, any usage beyond that has a cost. And on some hosts, if you have separate web and db servers (which is needed for heavy data/traffic), they meter that bandwidth, too (terrible host? Yes. But the point is that it happens).

I ran a website for 6 years that ended up with a peak of 5 million users. I co-lo'd my (eleven) servers: that's physical rack space (i.e. 'rent'), that's power, and that's bandwidth (not internal, but external. To the tune of hundreds of GB/day, even with 'optimized' assets and HTML). You can try to pick apart the explanation to spin some self-serving argument, but the inarguable bottom line is that these amounted to real costs - upwards of $1000/month at general cost, and that's not even including buying the physical machines. You're telling me I should have to pay out of my own pocket, out of the kindness of my heart, just because I built something that other used and enjoyed? I was unemployed for the first year I had built the site. It would have never gone anywhere at all without advertising.

I think you're oversimplifying your stance based on some assumption that the only non-commercial websites in the world are some kid talking about his cats or making political rants. There are tons of interactive, entertaining, and/or heavily data-driven websites that cater to, and are useful for, some subset of people - ones not selling anything, and not backed by corporate funding. Advertising is literally THE ONLY avenue for some - possibly 'many'; maybe even 'most' - of them. They do deserve to exist. That's what the internet is about.

If you want to go back to the 'good ol days' where every non-corporate website was a home directory on a university server, that's fine - Lynx is still around, and you won't have to deal with any advertising at all.

Besides, I never did see how showing an ad that is never followed through (meaning the product being hawked was sold because of the ad) can be profitable. Which is why I think the advertising based business model is extremely flawed.

Because companies pay to just have their message heard/seen. It's called CPM (Cost per thousand (Roman Numeral M) [impressions]), and it's alive and well.

Whether those companies continue to advertise with you if they have zero click-through is another discussion entirely, but those rates for campaigns on relevant topics do okay. You don't understand it because you're not thinking like an advertiser... that's okay, but don't damn the entire model just because you don't. Just understand that many websites that you enjoy pay their costs from advertising revenue.