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[CHATTER] [RAPID HEARTBEAT] [HIGH-PITCHED WHINE] [THEME MUSIC]
With the recent release of iOS 9 and Safari's mobile support of content filters--which we all know is just code for ad-blockers--we become again embroiled in the perennial debate surrounding what the internet has to do with the quickly-growing minority of all people who use ad-blocking software. If you don't know, it kind of just does what it says on the tin--blocks ads on the internet. The upshots are many-fold. Things look nicer and, in some cases, load quicker. Mobile batteries last longer, and less data is used. Some ad-blocking software also squashes creepy-crawlies tracking your internet travel so that they can serve you more targeted advertising. Because that's what you are--a target. More on that in a minute.
The downshots are single-fold but considerable. The places you like on the internet that make things you want to view stop existing. At least that's the song that's being sung. A huge portion of the online ecosphere-o-net is ad-supported, and when you block the ads, the ads don't support a thing. No money means no content. So Apple's decision to allow ad-blockers is a big deal, especially because mobile was, up until this point, mostly an open advertising pasture. Anyone who spends lots of time browsing on mobile--which is most Americans, at least, who spend an average of, like, three hours a day doing so--is pretty familiar with this. How many times a day do you accidentally tap a thing while trying expressly to not tap the thing? Congratulations. You've won. It's--it's at least two. At least. The introduction of ad-block--[CLEARS THROAT] content filters was done so under the auspices of user experience. Apps like Peace by Marco Arment--which, several weeks ago, shot up to number-one paid app spot in less than two days--will improve your mobile browsing experience. That is, until Marco removed the app from the store, and Apple issued refunds to everyone who paid for it.
Why, then, the change of heart? you may ask. Well, the success, he said, didn't feel good. The content industry relies on ads to exist. And weirdly, ad-blockers--at least paid ones--rely on the content industry. So you can maybe see why the weird feels. What's needed, he said, is a more complex, more nuanced approach to this problem--the problem of the web being a crowded hellscape of flashy nonsense that slows your roll and kills your charge. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. You've won.
MIKE RUGNETTA: Already, there have been some torchbearers entering this dungeon. Darius Kazemi, for one, made Ethical Ad Blocker, which simply blocks, completely, any website which is ad-supported. Now, I know what you're thinking, and it's something along the lines of, "Mike, an ad-blocker which blocks, literally, the entire website doesn't really seem, I don't think, to possess much in the way of nuance." And I totally agree. But Kazemi's ethical ad-blocker is a reminder of the truism that when the product is free, you are the product. The reason you can read "Awl" or "Onion" articles, "Vox," "Atlantic," and "Slate" hot-take think-pieces; or watch "Idea Channel" videos without paying for them up front with cash money, is that those things have been paid for already with your own eyeballs. Well, not actually them, but you get what I'm saying. You have, in fact, been sold. Or perhaps more accurately, the promise of your presence has been sold ahead of time in order to bankroll that sweet, sweet free content. Ethical Ad Blocker suggests that the easiest ethical way to exfiltrate from such an ad-ridden hot zone is to not enter it in the first place.
The solution is maybe just to deal with it, or to take Emily Eifler's stance. If content is pleasure, then ads are the work that you do to earn it. The counter-argument here is, one, don't I already work enough? And two, boy howdy, it gets weird being asked to work when I'm not expecting it. Sometimes I may even suspect that I'm working--viewing an ad--when I'm not, and this can make me very angry. Someone may get called a shill or be accused of being in the pocket of Big Bacon, and then it all just gets very messy. It's better in a bacon bowl. Seriously, though--in the way advertising extends products and their messages, it also sort of extends our workday, insofar as work is the opposite of leisure. We all know how complicated that relationship is. Some of the time that we spend being entertained, being at leisure, is often sacrificed to the advertising gods. Gripping, high-stakes scenes in "The Walking Dead" are interrupted by desperate pleas that I buy a Microsoft Surface or Progressive car insurance sold by Cyril Figgis in box form. Half-hour TV shows are 22 minutes. The radio's got to play local car dealer adverts between blocks of Demi Lovato's "Confident" on repeat. And print journalism is just--man, whatever they can, they're doing it, purity of audience experience be damned.
In other words, advertising slices time, space, coherence, and attention from entertainment, among many other places, to remind you and other people like you what else is out there. Ideally, it's stuff you want to be reminded about. But often, it's just stuff people want you to want to be reminded about. So like Demi Lovato's "Confident"--which I love, by the way--you are subjected to it constantly. (SINGING) What's wrong with being reminded constantly? Uh, ha, ha? Advertising, like pop music, realizes great success when repeated and reinforced in front of huge audiences via multiple sources. In her book, "Advertising in Modern and Postmodern Times," Pamela Odih calls it "standardizing the rhythms of consumer demand." This is a really old-school, factory assembly-line type idea. It requires that audiences be large in front of the same or similar ads around the same time, in the hopes that they'll all act similarly. When the desires of consumers are synchronized, when we are all reminded at the same time that there's a new Samsung phone or a new McDonald's menu item and we all act on that reminder, that's like capitalism landing a totally sweet kick-flip. Radical. Broadcast models of entertainment enable this advertising method and make it super-effective. The internet and new media technology make it less effective.
When the early 21st-century workday whistle blows--that is, if you're lucky enough to have a job--we don't all simultaneously flip to one of 10 TV stations or open one of three different newspapers. People get their entertainment and news out of sync from one another, from all over space and time. But advertising, and many of the industries that depend on it, still thrive on that synchronization. Internet ad servers are a solution to this problem. From a relatively few places, the same sets of ads get served algorithmically to many disparate services. So even though you and I may look at different websites at different times, our ads are most likely served by the same companies. People with similar browsing patterns or tracker profiles see that same Audi ad everywhere they go until we all finally get fed up and just go buy an Audi. Boom--rhythms standardized. Advertising. The problem with, and solution to, the solution to this advertising problem, is that programmatic ubiquity is much easier to defeat on the audience side than meatspace ubiquity--unless you have those glasses, I guess. Wikipedia's list of notable ad networks is only 31 entries long. An ad-blocker blocks a lot. Plus, it feels right to block internet ads. Because even with, and potentially because of, the tracking software they depend on, they don't feel like they're really interested in my satisfaction. Sniffing my bit-trail is a pretty shady foot to start off on.
The internet tends to reinforce the idea that we, the audience, are special. Personalization, curation, filter bubbles, democracy--whatever you want to call it, we get used to things being tailored for us. And programmatically placed advertising can be personalized, sure, but rarely in a way that doesn't feel like someone is trying to synchronize me, like my rhythms and a bunch of other people's needs to be regimented. This is my ad. There are many like it, but this one is mine. Meanwhile, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, the blogosphere--do we still say blogosphere? They can all provide streams of content which feel, at their base level, nonstandard, unsynchronized, unique. So internet advertising already feels out of place as soon as it's placed. It synchronizes me at the precise moment that I want to be asynchronous. It locates me when I'd rather be fleeting. It asks me to do work during leisure time. When online advertising can serve up the kind of complicated, asynchronous experiences so easily provided by the adjacent internet technologies, it won't feel extraneous and, therefore, eminently blockable. Or it might at least feel less like labor, like being caught or spotted and thus taken out of the experience in a way that's similar to but clearly also very distinct from how it happens with TV, newspaper, and radio ads.
The complication, of course, is the $21.8 billion in ad revenue apparently lost this year due to ad-blocking and the delicious content it could have paid for. We tolerate ads while watching live TV mostly because we have to. And the trade-off is that they make "The Walking Dead" and "The Good Wife" possible. On the internet, services like YouTube Red provide a compromise--no ads, and creators still get a taste. But man, that tends to be a remarkably small taste. Plus ad-blocking remains free or cheap, simple, and comprehensive. Until ads get hip to the game, where it becomes easy to economically support the creation of content at a fair rate across all websites as it is to just block ads, the best route may be to either look at those ads or just use the Ethical Ad--[LONG BEEP]
What do you guys think? Why is it that internet ads feel so eminently blockable? And is there an ethical solution to our current content dilemma? Let us know in the comments, and I will respond to some of them in next week's Comment Response video. In this week's Comment Response video, we talk about your thoughts regarding dead-all-along fan theories. If you want to watch that one, you can click right here, or find a link in the doobly-doo. This week's episode was brought to you by the hard work of these ad men and women. We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit--links in the doobly-doo. And the Tweet of The Week comes from @clacey24, who points us towards an online quiz to figure out whether or not you have been dead all along. Let us know how it turns out. I'm sure you're fine. And hey, in case you were wondering, this episode of "Idea Channel" was brought to you by Dropbox. If you're creating, presenting, designing, or building, Dropbox makes it easy to work together on any file. Because if you can work with anyone, anywhere, any way you want, the world will surely be full of more interesting things. Dropbox. All yours. [THEME MUSIC] [MUSIC PLAYING]