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Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm

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  Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2014-09-09 10:34 +0000
    Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Rob <monst.oorzudo@ntlworld.com> - 2014-09-09 20:04 +0100
      Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Dan Espen <despen@verizon.net> - 2014-09-09 15:34 -0400
        Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Rob <monst.oorzudo@ntlworld.com> - 2014-09-16 21:09 +0100
    Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2014-09-09 19:27 +0000
    Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm +++ATH0 <usenet.20.sdr@spamgourmet.com> - 2014-09-09 19:39 +0000
      Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2014-09-09 16:09 -0400
        Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-09-10 18:12 +0000
          Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2014-09-10 18:40 +0000
            Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-09-11 11:25 +0000
              Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2014-09-11 16:21 +0000
          Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us (Scott Alfter) - 2014-09-11 19:17 +0000
            Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2014-09-11 16:09 -0400
              Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2014-09-11 22:30 +0000
                Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-09-12 11:23 +0000
              Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2014-09-11 22:36 +0000
                Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-09-12 11:49 +0000
                Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2014-09-12 16:26 -0300
                  Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2014-09-12 17:07 -0400
                    Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2014-09-13 01:16 -0300
    Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Chris J Dixon <chris@cdixon.me.uk> - 2014-09-10 08:02 +0100
      Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-09-10 09:53 +0200
        Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2014-09-10 09:44 +0000
        Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Adrian <bulleid@ku.gro.lioff> - 2014-09-10 19:59 +0100
          Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2014-09-10 19:15 +0000
      Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2014-09-10 09:40 +0000
        Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Johny B Good <johnny-b-good@invalid.ntlworld.com> - 2014-09-10 17:09 +0100
    Re: Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster', says data firm Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-09-10 10:05 +0200

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#4777

Rich wrote:

>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/09/blocking-adverts-napster-for-the-publishing-industry
>
>   More internet users are blocking adverts than ever before, according to
>   a new report, with the rate more than doubling over the course of last
>   year.
>
>   As of June 2014, almost 150 million browsers are using some form of ad
>   blocker, the vast majority of whom are using plug-ins for either
>   Google's Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox browser.
>
>   Those figures are significantly larger than the authors had expected.
>   ?We did a report last year, around the same time, and we had anticipated
>   growth of about 43%,? said Sean Blanchfield of PageFair, which produced
>   the report with Adobe. ?What really surprised us was that the actual
>   growth was significantly higher.?

I wonder how the comparable statistics look for commercial TV
viewed via PVR? I can't remember when I last watched an advert.

Chris
-- 
Chris J Dixon  Nottingham UK
chris@cdixon.me.uk

Plant amazing Acers.

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#4779

On 2014-09-10, Chris J Dixon <chris@cdixon.me.uk> wrote:
> Rich wrote:
>
>>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/09/blocking-adverts-napster-for-the-publishing-industry
>>
>>   More internet users are blocking adverts than ever before, according to
>>   a new report, with the rate more than doubling over the course of last
>>   year.
>>
>>   As of June 2014, almost 150 million browsers are using some form of ad
>>   blocker, the vast majority of whom are using plug-ins for either
>>   Google's Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox browser.
>>
>>   Those figures are significantly larger than the authors had expected.
>>   ?We did a report last year, around the same time, and we had anticipated
>>   growth of about 43%,? said Sean Blanchfield of PageFair, which produced
>>   the report with Adobe. ?What really surprised us was that the actual
>>   growth was significantly higher.?
>
> I wonder how the comparable statistics look for commercial TV
> viewed via PVR? I can't remember when I last watched an advert.

I don't have PVR any more but when I did I became quite an expert at fast
forwarding to exactly the right point past the adverts.

They only have themselves to blame.  When I lived in Europe during the 80s
one of the highlights of a trip back to the UK was watching *decent*
adverts, many of which were humorous and/or artistically done.  That is
no longer the case.

I had cable TV with a selection of UK channels until 2 years ago and found
the adverts on those channels unbearably intrusive, and yes I include the
BBC who aren't allowed to do commercial advertising, but do advertise their
own products very heavily.

Until they fell foul of the authorities, ITV were bumping up the volume
during adverts to the point that I would keep the remote close by and
adjust the volume.  The adverts were uncomfortably loud and the difference
was so marked that I _would_ need to increase the volume once the adverts
were over to hear the programme being watched.  Once the authorities told
them to stop, they adjusted the relative volume by some measure or other
but used sound shaping (can't remember the appropriate phrase) such that
the brain perceives an increase in volume, even though an electrical meter
will say the legal limits have not been exceeded.

The other thing was the timing and length of the adverts.  I believe that
this was (still is?) 12 minutes per hour for the UK, but they manipulate
the schedules so that you probably watch 16 minutes of ads if sitting down
to watch a 1 hour programme.

And they wonder why we want to block this stuff?

-- 
So excited for the Apple Watch. For centuries, we’ve checked the time
by looking at our phones. Having it on your wrist? Genius.
                                                   -- Ellen DeGeneres

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#4783

Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> wrote:
> On 2014-09-10, Chris J Dixon <chris@cdixon.me.uk> wrote:
> > Rich wrote:
> >
> >>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/09/blocking-adverts-napster-for-the-publishing-industry
> >>
> >>   More internet users are blocking adverts than ever before,
> >>   according to a new report, with the rate more than doubling over
> >>   the course of last year.
> >>
> >>   As of June 2014, almost 150 million browsers are using some form
> >>   of ad blocker, the vast majority of whom are using plug-ins for
> >>   either Google's Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox browser.
> >>
> >>   Those figures are significantly larger than the authors had
> >>   ?expected. We did a report last year, around the same time, and
> >>   ?we had anticipated
> >>   growth of about 43%,? said Sean Blanchfield of PageFair, which produced
> >>   the report with Adobe. ?What really surprised us was that the actual
> >>   growth was significantly higher.?
> >
> > I wonder how the comparable statistics look for commercial TV
> > viewed via PVR? I can't remember when I last watched an advert.

> ...

> The other thing was the timing and length of the adverts.  I believe
> that this was (still is?) 12 minutes per hour for the UK, but they
> manipulate the schedules so that you probably watch 16 minutes of ads
> if sitting down to watch a 1 hour programme.

In the US, currently the typical "load" of commericals per hour of show
is right about 18-20 minutes.  So the show that is scheduled for 60
minutes on the clock, if one removes all the commerical breaks first,
only really lasts about 42 minutes.

> And they wonder why we want to block this stuff?

True.  Somehow they have a Steve Jobs level reality distortion field
that they keep turned on full power all the time.

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#4804

In message <vkc5eb-i9a.ln1@news.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture 
<nospam@sture.ch> writes
>The other thing was the timing and length of the adverts.  I believe that
>this was (still is?) 12 minutes per hour for the UK, but they manipulate
>the schedules so that you probably watch 16 minutes of ads if sitting down
>to watch a 1 hour programme.
>

I think that has been dropped, and it is now more flexible.  If you 
watch stuff in the middle of the night, you can go for a couple of hours 
without an advert, whereas during the more popular hours, you can't.  I 
suspect that over a 24 hour period it is fixed (it might be 12 x 24 to 
use your figures above).  The non-mainstream digital channels are worse, 
some of those I've timed at having 5 minute breaks.  What used to be a 
50 minute programme is now nearer 75 minutes.


Adrian
-- 
To Reply :
replace "bulleid" with "adrian" - all mail to bulleid is rejected
Sorry for the rigmarole, If I want spam, I'll go to the shops
Every time someone says "I don't believe in trolls", another one dies.

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#4806

On 2014-09-10, Adrian <bulleid@ku.gro.lioff> wrote:
> In message <vkc5eb-i9a.ln1@news.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture 
><nospam@sture.ch> writes
>>The other thing was the timing and length of the adverts.  I believe that
>>this was (still is?) 12 minutes per hour for the UK, but they manipulate
>>the schedules so that you probably watch 16 minutes of ads if sitting down
>>to watch a 1 hour programme.
>>
>
> I think that has been dropped, and it is now more flexible.  If you 
> watch stuff in the middle of the night, you can go for a couple of hours 
> without an advert, whereas during the more popular hours, you can't.  I 
> suspect that over a 24 hour period it is fixed (it might be 12 x 24 to 
> use your figures above).  The non-mainstream digital channels are worse, 
> some of those I've timed at having 5 minute breaks.  What used to be a 
> 50 minute programme is now nearer 75 minutes.

I worked for a TV company any years ago (working on an advertising air
time sales system written in MUMPS & a "talent" payment system written
in RPG2).  At the time, IIRC the companies were allowed to show 12 minutes
an hour of advertising, and they were allowed to "borrow" a minute from
an adjacent hour, IOW, you could have 11, 14, 11 minutes around the 9 o'clock
peak hour. As for the wee small hours, it was simply the case that no-one
wanted to buy the air-time, so there were simply no adverts.

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#4782

Chris J Dixon <chris@cdixon.me.uk> wrote:
> Rich wrote:

> >http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/09/blocking-adverts-napster-for-the-publishing-industry
> >
> >   More internet users are blocking adverts than ever before,
> >   according to a new report, with the rate more than doubling over
> >   the course of last year.
> >
> >   As of June 2014, almost 150 million browsers are using some form
> >   of ad blocker, the vast majority of whom are using plug-ins for
> >   either Google's Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox browser.
> >
> >   Those figures are significantly larger than the authors had
> >   ?expected. We did a report last year, around the same time, and
> >   ?we had anticipated
> >   growth of about 43%,? said Sean Blanchfield of PageFair, which produced
> >   the report with Adobe. ?What really surprised us was that the actual
> >   growth was significantly higher.?

> I wonder how the comparable statistics look for commercial TV viewed
> via PVR? I can't remember when I last watched an advert.

They'd have a brain hemmorage if they knew what I do with the TV I
watch (at least the broadcast TV).  It gets captured into my PVR,
whereupon I proceed to edit out all of the commericals before watching
the capture.  So when I do get around to watching the show, there are
simply no commerical breaks, not even anything to jump over.

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#4794

On Wed, 10 Sep 2014 09:40:35 +0000 (UTC), Rich <rich@example.invalid>
wrote:

>Chris J Dixon <chris@cdixon.me.uk> wrote:
>> Rich wrote:
>
>> >http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/09/blocking-adverts-napster-for-the-publishing-industry
>> >
>> >   More internet users are blocking adverts than ever before,
>> >   according to a new report, with the rate more than doubling over
>> >   the course of last year.
>> >
>> >   As of June 2014, almost 150 million browsers are using some form
>> >   of ad blocker, the vast majority of whom are using plug-ins for
>> >   either Google's Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox browser.
>> >
>> >   Those figures are significantly larger than the authors had
>> >   ?expected. We did a report last year, around the same time, and
>> >   ?we had anticipated
>> >   growth of about 43%,? said Sean Blanchfield of PageFair, which produced
>> >   the report with Adobe. ?What really surprised us was that the actual
>> >   growth was significantly higher.?
>
>> I wonder how the comparable statistics look for commercial TV viewed
>> via PVR? I can't remember when I last watched an advert.
>
>They'd have a brain hemmorage if they knew what I do with the TV I
>watch (at least the broadcast TV).  It gets captured into my PVR,
>whereupon I proceed to edit out all of the commericals before watching
>the capture.  So when I do get around to watching the show, there are
>simply no commerical breaks, not even anything to jump over.

 I've been doing most of my TV viewing on my desktop monitor
(currently a 1920 by 1080 Asus) this past decade or so, actually
pre-dating FreeView by a few years. As a consequence, ever since I
replaced the analogue tuner card[1] with a DVB-T device (usb types at
first and now a PCI adapter), I've been capturing worthy broadcasts to
disk archive (up to around about 9 or 10 TB's worth now - mostly SD
stuff), using MPEG_Streamclip to top and tail the program segments to
the nearest whole GOP which is sufficiently accurate enough to excise
the continuity rubbish on BBC broadcasts.

 I'ts only when I bother to record a commercial broadcast (Channel
Four and Dave) that it starts to get a little more complicated in that
I have to slice and dice the programme into their appropriate parts in
between the ads and continuity which I  then reassemble into an ad
free recording using MPEG2Cut to join the slices all back together
again, followed by another go through MPEG_Streamclip to "Fix Timecode
Breaks".

 As you can see, I'm only using a couple of freeware tools to process
the recordings rather than an expensive video editing suite. As far as
BBC broadcasts go, this is sufficient for my needs. It only gets
complicated when I'm dealing with commercially polluted broadcast
material from the likes of Channel Four and Dave.

 I used to have the Monday to Friday 6pm half hour slot on Channel
Four scheduled to capture the Simpsons from when the BBC 'dropped the
ball' and let it fall into the clutches of CH4. I stopped doing this
about 6 months or so back when I realised I was better off with the
torrent sourced episodes rather than having to process the endless
repeats of each episode in order to pick out the least vandalised of
each episode. In short, recording commerially aired programmes is just
far too much effort for the return.

 BBC broadcasts are probably less work using MPEG_Streamclip, once
only per clip, than using a more sophisticated video editor capable of
speeding up the process of excising the advert breaks from the
commercial broadcasts. Since, imho, there's very little of worth being
broadcast by the commercial stations, I've really not felt the need
for anything more fancy than those two basic MPG editing programs
(MPEG_Streamclip and Mpg2Cut2).

 As far as Freeview is concerned, the commercial stations might just
as well not exist since, in practice they don't! :-)

 The XYL (SWMBI) mostly watches commercial stations with a smattering
of BBC1 thrown in for the soaps and lifestyle programming. I suspect
this is a generic female view of TV broadcasting whereby the woman of
the house takes such intrusive advertising in their stride, pretending
not to be influenced or claiming they're not annoyed because they've
been there as part of the landscape from day one.

 It seems to me to be a fact that ITV in particular are cynically
taking full advantage of, going by the largely female orientated
programme content and style of the adverts.

 The only time I land up seeing any TV adverts at all is when I happen
to 'drop in' on the XYL whilst she's watching the telly (usually a
soap).

 I work from home so I sometimes find myself 'getting into' a classic
black and white movie being shown on Channel Five when sat at the
kitchen dining table with SWMBI. When this happens, I'll take my leave
at the next post lunch ad break and torrent download the movie.

 An SD version can usually be found with little difficulty, about
700MB or so which I can have downloaded in about 5 minutes, a little
less than the time wasted sitting through an ad break (usually with
the sound on mute in my case).

 This does rather beg the question: "What is the point of Channel
Five?" which in turn leads to: "What is the point of commercial TV
anyway?". If it weren't for the existence of XYLs or SWMBO, SWMBI,
there'd be absolutely no point at all, imho.

[1] The trouble with an analogue tuner was that you either invested in
a very expensive one with 'on-the-fly' hardware based mpg encoding
built in or else run the conversion on an uncompressed video capture
(around 1GB per 10 minutes worth of broadcast) with a cheap card
afterwards.

 Since I couldn't afford to tie up hundreds of GB's worth of disk
space (or even afford hundreds of GB's worth of disk storage in the
first place) and I also couldn't afford any of the more expensive
adapters, I was restricted to viewing live TV.

 I did try recording TV programmes but the results weren't too
pleasing - a lack of resources, basically CPU power and RAM at that
point in time. DVB-T was a Godsend since, at a stroke, it did away
with the need for fast powerful processors and vast amounts of ram and
disk storage otherwise required to run the PC as a PVR.

 In the intervening time between fitting an analogue tuner and a DVB-T
tuner, I had to content myself with simply watching live TV and enjoy
being able to watch the programmes 'full frame', a rather novel
experience after suffering the slings and arrows of overscanned TV
sets. I've been 'televisually' divorced from the XYL ever since. :-)
-- 
J B Good

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#4780

On 2014-09-09, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
>
> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/09/blocking-adverts-napster-for-the-publishing-industry
>
>    More internet users are blocking adverts than ever before, according to
>    a new report, with the rate more than doubling over the course of last
>    year.

The article linked at the bottom of that page gives some background on
what AdBlock Plus does.

"Adblock Plus: the tiny plugin threatening the internet's business model"

<http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/14/the-tiny-german-company-threatening-the-internets-business-model>

-- 
So excited for the Apple Watch. For centuries, we’ve checked the time
by looking at our phones. Having it on your wrist? Genius.
                                                   -- Ellen DeGeneres

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