I feel like there’s a category difference for business models where they expect everyone to act in a certain way, but make money from the exceptions.
Ads is one example. Publishers and advertisers know that the vast majority of people won’t click on any particular ad, so not clicking on an ad doesn’t seem like freeloading to me. However installing an ad blocker so that you don’t even see the ads, or seeing a product advertised that you want and going to their website directly without clicking on the ad both feel much more like freeloading.
The implicit contract with the reader isn’t “click ads”, I think it’s more like, “see the ads and click if one is relevant and timely”. You aren’t breaking the contract if you don’t click on an irrelevant ad. You are breaking it if you never even see the ads.
What would be an equivalent of an ad blocker in freemium software? Automatically detect and disable all “buy” buttons? That actually sounds like a possibly useful tool, if you have kids.
What would be your opinion on a tool that detects ads and disables the entire web page? Like, some kind of proxy server which would just return “error 499 contains ads” instead of the page. You are not reading the product anymore, and you are not incentivizing the publisher to move behind a paywall—from your perspective, they are already there. Would this still qualify in your opinion as freeloading?
Assuming that subliminal advertising works (for example in form of words strategically hidden in text), what about a tool that detects and underlines such words (and thus, hypothetically, reduces their hypnotic power). Also freeloading?
An artificial intelligence that reviews a free service and warns me “I predict with 95% probability that within five years this service will switch to a paid-only model”, so that I avoid using the service, and thus avoid the possible future where I get so used to it that I would rather start paying than give it up.
Sticking fingers in your ears while an extra annoying unskippable ad is playing on YouTube.
An app that detects advertising for various financial services, and add a text saying “probably a scam” below the advertisement (without hiding any part of the ad). Is the answer different if it is a machine learning app that actually very precisely predicts the probability of the product being an actual scam?
You see an ad for an interesting book and decide to buy it… but then you realize that you know another shop where the books are 30% cheaper. Yet, without having seen the ad from the expensive shop, you wouldn’t have spontaneously decided to buy the book.
Using the bathroom during the ads on TV.
Completing a mind-self-control curse that makes you 100% resistant to advertising. Or just using classical self-control, but you happen to be a rare individual who has almost perfect self-control.
I feel like there’s a category difference for business models where they expect everyone to act in a certain way, but make money from the exceptions.
Ads is one example. Publishers and advertisers know that the vast majority of people won’t click on any particular ad, so not clicking on an ad doesn’t seem like freeloading to me. However installing an ad blocker so that you don’t even see the ads, or seeing a product advertised that you want and going to their website directly without clicking on the ad both feel much more like freeloading.
The implicit contract with the reader isn’t “click ads”, I think it’s more like, “see the ads and click if one is relevant and timely”. You aren’t breaking the contract if you don’t click on an irrelevant ad. You are breaking it if you never even see the ads.
See also: freemium software.
What would be an equivalent of an ad blocker in freemium software? Automatically detect and disable all “buy” buttons? That actually sounds like a possibly useful tool, if you have kids.
What would be your opinion on a tool that detects ads and disables the entire web page? Like, some kind of proxy server which would just return “error 499 contains ads” instead of the page. You are not reading the product anymore, and you are not incentivizing the publisher to move behind a paywall—from your perspective, they are already there. Would this still qualify in your opinion as freeloading?
Assuming that subliminal advertising works (for example in form of words strategically hidden in text), what about a tool that detects and underlines such words (and thus, hypothetically, reduces their hypnotic power). Also freeloading?
An artificial intelligence that reviews a free service and warns me “I predict with 95% probability that within five years this service will switch to a paid-only model”, so that I avoid using the service, and thus avoid the possible future where I get so used to it that I would rather start paying than give it up.
Sticking fingers in your ears while an extra annoying unskippable ad is playing on YouTube.
An app that detects advertising for various financial services, and add a text saying “probably a scam” below the advertisement (without hiding any part of the ad). Is the answer different if it is a machine learning app that actually very precisely predicts the probability of the product being an actual scam?
You see an ad for an interesting book and decide to buy it… but then you realize that you know another shop where the books are 30% cheaper. Yet, without having seen the ad from the expensive shop, you wouldn’t have spontaneously decided to buy the book.
Using the bathroom during the ads on TV.
Completing a mind-self-control curse that makes you 100% resistant to advertising. Or just using classical self-control, but you happen to be a rare individual who has almost perfect self-control.