Yeah, I know I can turn off my computer’s audio entirely, and I do a lot of the time, but it sucks when I’m listening to MP3s or audiobooks, surfing the web and I get hijacked by some stupid shill!

Probably they put some text up on the page behind where the ad would be – so those that don’t block the ad, it was rendered over the top of the text and they would never see it. They probably never identified who was using adblock and who wasn’t, only the users themselves see the difference.

I’m not trying to say that no one should ever click “skip this ad” or block pop-ups, just that: to the extent that I or you or anyone does, and that we remain unwilling to pay subscription fees, we’re encouraging an increasingly hostile arms race for ads and eyeballs—or setting up the conditions under which we’ll lose free media altogether. And to pretend otherwise, or to be outraged by it, is not really to get the dynamic at work here.

Matt @37: you know who I blame for the omnipresent, mid-show (or for Sci-Fi channel, it seems, ALL-SHOW) advertising crawl? TiVo.

I’ve upgraded to Reading Comprehension 2.0 and now get your initial point.

Joel – my version of the implicit contract says I don’t mind static silent ads, but I’m not going to put up with singing/dancing/popup versions. So, I only upgrade my adblocking when the latter become pervasive, as they have done recently.

You might say I should just avoid the sites that have these ads, but this set changes over time, and they don’t announce themselves in advance.

In some sense it ended at the only point it could—on the anniversary of its kickoff. Assuming that a significant chunk of the paying customers were charter subscribers, killing the service on the anniversary was the best way to avoid owing significant refunds or alternative compensation.

Stop it sooner and they’d have been liable for the tail end of the second paid year; let it go longer and they’d have had to start collecting year three payments.

I actually heard the rumor that TimesSelect was going away some months ago, at which point it was obvious to me that the second anniversary was when they’d pull the plug.

DD

And advertising depends on the idea that we’ll give you free content if you (some of you) buy this stuff. Unless the notion of implicit promises and system effects is doing some work here, I still don’t see what the difference is supposed to be between “If no one looks at the ads, media will go out of business” and “If no one buys the products, media will go out of business.”

And people have used an argument like yours to claim that it’s immoral to watch TV programs without the ads (my snarky response in comment 6), so it isn’t like there’s no slip in the slope.

I didn’t defend BitTorrenting and downloading, btw. What do you think about BugMeNot, though? Logging on under someone else’s name is a violation of an explicit contract, I’d bet.

This does happen with the built-in ad-blocking in Firefox, but most people use extensions, which are much more flexible. Still, there are ways to prevent that from being effective too. I believe yahoo (last time I checked) uses a URL scheme where every image has the same URL format, so it’s impossible to filter out just the ads.

Isn’t there a lot of room for growth beyond the ‘available finance’ based on the kind of social capital discussed in ‘The Wealth of Networks’ by Yochai Benkler?

What’s more: you are in the driver’s seat. If you don’t like Thomas Friedman, don’t click on his articles in The Times. They’ll notice. If you love Paul Krugman, read his article—and maybe check out the Subaru or Visa or Weinstein Co. ad while you’re there. What does it take up? 50K of bandwidth and 200 pixels of your screen? Is that so inconvenient you can’t stand it?

As for Kid Rock: if you don’t want to listen to him, don’t. But if you like Tapes-n-Tapes or Tom Waits or Thomas Ades, buy their damned album. If you think Jerry Bruckheimer only puts out dreck, don’t watch it. But if you love Pedro Almodovar or Wong Kar-Wai or the Coen Brothers, buy their DVD. It’s not an argument to say, “I download it free because they suck anyway.”

This just isn’t that complicated—or expensive. And it’s certainly not “dangerous.” What’s also not dangerous, exactly, but is troubling and hard to figure out a way around (blogs are one answer, in part), is that, for instance, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s revenue is down something like 25 percent this year. That Village Voice Media is bleeding money and increasingly runs wire articles in The City Pages, which used to be—until very recently—an incubator of great national editorial and reporting talent. And that the same thing is happening all over the country.

I think there’s plenty of room for gift economies of arts, for professionals otherwise-subsidized to participate in our arts and journalistic culture, for actors and musicians (alas, much harder for writers) to make a living with live performances, etcetera. If Ticketmaster and Clear Channel went away tomorrow, I wouldn’t shed a tear. But if The New York Times slashed its editorial room by half or Viacom dropped The Daily Show because half its audience found it easier to watch it on YouTube or The Criterion Collection had to double its DVD prices because everyone was getting Andrei Rublev via BitTorrent (and bloody hell, they’re expensive enough as it is), I would be really, seriously bummed.