The Ramblings of a Keyboard Monkey

Hank Green's Tumblr: On Ad Block

fishingboatproceeds:

edwardspoonhands:

On my most recent video I saw a whole ton of comments from people saying “I never see pre-rolls on Vlogbrothers videos because I have AD BLOCK installed.” Well, two problems here.

1. No one sees pre-rolls on vlogbrothers videos because we don’t run them
2. I am not sure how I feel about Ad Blockers and I wish you would consider your decision more carefully, especially your apparent desire to share the world. 

   If everyone was like you and used ad blockers, there would be no Freddie Wong videos to watch. There would be no YouTube. There would be no Google or GMail or Facebook or any of it. If everyone used ad block, the internet would be made of things that suck and things that cost money.

   And so when you say to the world “HEY PONCES! WTF AREN’T YOU USING AD BLOCK! SUCKERS!” What you’re saying is “Let’s all work together to destroy the internet.”

   The only reason Ad Block works for you is that most people don’t use it. It is in your best interest to keep Ad Block quiet and not let anyone know about it. Spend like 13 seconds thinking through a world where Ad Block gets installed on a substantial number of browsers in the world:

   Advertisers call up platforms (Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc) and say “We aren’t going to pay you for advertisements if no one sees them.”

   The platforms freak out and spend a huge amount of time and money creating Ad Block Blockers. Maybe they partner with Mozilla. Maybe with the US Government. Maybe they create another technological solution. In any case, afterward the internet is clunkier and maybe even less free than beforehand.

   Ad Blockers counter by working around the work-arounds. 

   Advertisers still pull back funds, the internet gets worse. Less money is spent on making the internet cool and interesting, more money is spend on trying to defeat Ad Blockers. 

   At the end of the day, your attempts to remove some pixels that were off in the corner of the screen where you probably would never have seen them anyway have made the whole world a less awesome place. 

   I understand the desire to work-around a system that annoys you. But I do not understand the apparent inability of some people to think their decisions through to their logical conclusion.

   ***FOOTNOTE ON TUMBLR***

   You may notice that Tumblr neither costs money nor sucks. However, before Tumblr got it’s most recent round of venture capital funding, you may also remember how it was crashing 20 or 30 times per day. The funding that made it possible for Tumblr to stay online consistently would not have come in if the people with that money did not believe that someday Tumblr would have some kind of path to profitability…and the clearest of those paths is through advertising.

I’m reblogging this again because 90% of the comments in my new video seem to brag about AdBlock as if it’s some easy solution to the complicated role that corporations play in facilitating and problematizing the relationship between people who make stuff on the Internet and people who enjoy that stuff.

In fact, AdBlock does no such thing. It mostly only hurts the creators of the stuff you like, because it doesn’t prevent YouTube from collecting valuable information about you that they then use to grow and improve their company. If everyone—or even 20% of people—used AdBlock, we could not afford to ignore our other jobs to make regular vlogbrothers videos, let alone create expensive educational content like crashcourse.

I don’t know what the solution to this complicated problem is, but it sure as hell isn’t AdBlock.

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