> But don’t pretend that by offering your site for free and me using it for free somehow requires me to see shitty ads.
If you want my money, ask for it. If your content is worth it I’ll pay for it.
One of my personal favorites: movie theatres.
You pay, a handsome amount of money, to see a movie, once, and if you happen to have the weird idea of not be just late enough to the movie, you get the wonderful, once in a lifetime opportunity… to get ads shoved in your face. Ads for food, ads for random stuff, and ads for other movies.
The best of both worlds, really.
Used to drive me crazy. Now I simply don’t go anymore.
I went to the theatre last weekend (first time since before the late unpleasantness) and showed up about ten minutes after the posted showtime. The attendant at the ticket booth confused asked "are you sure you don't want the next showing that one has already started". I confirmed no I wanted the one that had "started". I didn't miss any movie though just the ads.
Trailers are the kind of ad targeting that I don’t object to. Advertising movies to me right before I see a movie is:
* Relevant. You know I’m interested in movies, since I’m at one, so you don’t have to spy on me to do it. Some theaters might be spying on me, I dunno, but they don’t have to in principle.
* Not directly interfering with my original purpose. The movie hasn’t started yet. The only thing you might be showing me before the movie is, maybe, cartoon shorts? I guess that would be more fun than ads, but the ads aren’t going to give me malware or pretend to be from the FBI when they’re not, so it’s not as bad as internet ads.
* If the theater starts advertising scams, they have a brick-and-mortar address, they’re in the same legal jurisdiction as the visitors, and everyone sees the same ads, so suing them should be an option. Everybody who visited the movie saw the same set of ads, so if it’s a scam, there’s plenty of witnesses.
> If the theater starts advertising scams, they have a brick-and-mortar address, they’re in the same legal jurisdiction as the visitors, and everyone sees the same ads
That’s something else that drives me crazy with both YouTube & Twitter. The number of scams that run in their ads.
Some falsely referring to some local celebrity only to sell some dodgy pseudo-financial product. Others selling medical products that would be heavily regulated if they did anything close to what they promise, sometimes vaguely citing "medical research" and "new discoveries".
Almost as if they didn’t review them before letting them go live!
But we never hear a word about that, no.
Governments try to have all our online chats preemptively monitored to chase after pedophiles[1] (and then it’ll be terrorists, and heck, after that, why not copyright infringements while they’re at it? ie Hadopi)…
The news and our Dear Leaders keep ranting about Facebook, Google and Twitter because of how they are used to spread disinformation to further some political goals…
They also all keeps bashing Facebook & Google for supposedly causing the ruin of the news media (all of which then rants on about it whenever given a chance, mostly spouting nonsense, even those I like).
But big, supposedly (and probably wrongly) trusted platforms spreading scams at scale all over the world? That’s apparently not worth any widespread effort, fine or headline.
I keep seeing adverts for what's basically a bedsheet with £5 worth of copper wire in it sold at a ridiculous price as an "earthing mat". Not only is this shamelessly a scam, it also plugs into the mains so if they wire it badly (which as a shameless scam seems pretty likely) that's 240 V directly into your sleeping body. I've reported it as a scam so many times but nothing gets done.
If that bullshit worked you could just throw yourself in the sea for free rather than paying some pillock on Facebook. No better connection to earth than that!
But they are interrupting your original purpose! You bought a ticket for a movie starting at time X. At time X the theater is showing ads. This means at time X+length of movie you're still not done. Your schedule was delayed for the ads.
Oh, true, forgot that one; it’s even better! Some also (used to?) connect to any open wifi nearby if you forgot to give it access to yours. How thoughtful…
Pretty much the reason I scorned every single "smart tv"
My TV seriously wanted to put itself in some sort of demo mode if I didn’t connect it to wifi. That included restarting itself and redoing the settings every 30 minutes or whatever. It’s an insane ultimatum! So yeah it’s in a zone it can ping home base and nothing less. But for the 99% of people who can’t do that crap it sucks.
I am not surprised. Samsung are well known for bundling a load of crapware on Android phones to the point where every review of lightly themed Android phones screams "clean, stock interface".
I haven't had a TV in years, but if I had to get a large display for some reason I'd go for a dedicated large monitor + a set top box or some media centre appliance to actually play the media/tune in to TV. You pay a lot more (I was looking at a Dell 55" monitor for around $5k AUD, where an equivalent size TV is $1K from a name brand manufacturer), but IMHO it's worth it.
Or maybe skip straight to an LED projector, I hear those are nice.
Look into digital signage displays. They're just big dumb monitors, but tend to be cheaper than similarly-sized displays that are marketed as monitors.
Just glancing at Amazon, I see a 65-inch 4k digital signage display for under $1200 USD.
I always wanted to experiment with one of these but fortunately I managed to avoid them so far.
I wonder what would happen if you limited their bandwidth to a couple of kbps. Just enough to get the pings across but make any ad download excruciatingly slow. Or write some kind of DPI rule that drops packets to the internet above a certain size.
Blocking outright is probably an edge case these devices will detect and handle differently in the following years as more and more people will be aware of the option.
That's why I think experimenting with more advanced sabotage will pay off in the long run.
When I lived Brazil, they used to do like 1 ad (plus trailers), so it was pretty quick, and because everywhere (where I lived) had numbered seats, you could just be 5 min 'late'.
Now when I moved to Canada: no numbered seats, and 20 (yeah, TWENTY) minutes of ads + trailers. WTF is wrong with you people? I just don't go anymore
Either you get a random seat, perhaps apart from your party, perhaps miss a bit of the movie (although unlikely), and get not to watch ads.
Or you arrive on time, perhaps slightly early, get to pick where you sit, together, and get a shit ton of ads shoved down your eyes and ears for nearly half an tour, in full IMAX & DolbyVision 20.8.
Edit: Oh, and you don’t know at what time the movie actually ends, because they tell you when the ads start, and how long the movie lasts. But you have to factor in the very important ad time.
I just straight up refuse to pay for no numbered seats, specially if it's not only me and my wife. I want to go to the theatre for the experience, and having to stress if we are going to sit together/in a good spot is not what I have in mind for that
Are you upset about movie trailers? I'll be honest I haven't been to the theatres in quite a while so I don't know if they actually show ads now but back when I was younger all "ads" before a move were just trailers for upcoming films which I loved because it let me stay current with what was coming out in the future. I don't mind that at all considering I'm not spending a lot of time at home Googling upcoming movies
There still are trailers which, even though they still are unasked for advertising, don’t annoy me much (except for the occasional pseudo-horror gruesome jump-scare movie trailer now and then. Seriously, being at a showing of a movie for people over 13 doesn’t mean we want to deal with that).
But there’s also, before those, ~20 minutes of "regular" ads. Ads for M&Ms. Ads for cars. Ads for some pseudo-luxury perfumes. Ads, ads, ads… even ads for the company that places the ads in movie theatres!
One of my personal favorites: movie theatres.
You pay, a handsome amount of money, to see a movie, once, and if you happen to have the weird idea of not be just late enough to the movie, you get the wonderful, once in a lifetime opportunity… to get ads shoved in your face. Ads for food, ads for random stuff, and ads for other movies.
The best of both worlds, really.
Used to drive me crazy. Now I simply don’t go anymore.