On Sep 19, 2015, at 3:52 PM, StJ Deakins < " class=""> > wrote: Great to have you back! To all lurkers and infrequent-ers: come on in. The water’s warm. but have been following the ad blocking discussion with great interest. It seems to me that the simple answer is to give people personal agency and the ability to opt-in to ads and brands that they want to interact with (essentially VRM). Exactly. FWIW, I’ve been writing about the adblocking thing (and the larger context that we’ve been talking about for awhile) here. The series: I think this thing is coming to a head, that it will be a big one, that we in the VRM community need to be in front of it, and that we should try to make peace while all the mainstream media are calling it war, because that’s the cheap, easy and simplistic thing to do. Ads pay for an open and ubiquitously available internet. I’m not saying that maintaining network connections has no costs. They do. But most of them aren’t borne by advertising. They are by us, in what we pay our ISPs and mobile carriers for connections. This is incredibly important to the continued development of a global, benevolent and inclusive web. E.g. A farmer in Botswana can use free Google spreadsheets because of brand offering information (paid ads and earned/native content) that I actually want to see when I'm considering what car to buy in the UK. So, for me, the issue is not advertising per se - advertising has helped pay for content in real life since the dawn of the media age in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. The problem is that the current digital ad system is downright dysfunctional, exploitative and set to destroy the very ecosystem that it relies on. There are parallels with overfishing of the oceans. People block and 'disappear' from the digital sea because they're being exploited. This systemic "fishing" attitude is unsustainable. The ecosystem will soon collapse. The digital marketing systems that we currently have clearly need to be evolved - and very quickly. Yes, there are other forms of bad acting, such as popovers and all that, but the main distinction we need to make is between advertising’s wheat and chaff. This is the “nuance” that Marco Arment, the maker of Peace, the instantly bestselling ad blocker for IOS 9, needs the next rev of his app to respect. (Context.) Note: while Adblock Plus’s “acceptable ads” whitelist is a worthy effort, it doesn’t draw the same clear distinction we’re talking about here. Also, only Adblock Plus defines it. We're quoted about it at the end of this article on the BBC site today: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34268416 Let them decide who they trade it with and for what reward," (and we will be sharing more about what we're building to try to solve this issue shortly). To be clear, I’m not denying that some of that data has sale value. And I think that’s an avenue worth driving down. I’m just pointing out that use value matters too. (I wrote some stuff about this several years ago here.) Would love to hear thoughts. Doc (in a hurry between obligations in Prague…)
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