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Date:      Mon, 4 May 1998 00:33:56 +0200
From:      Eivind Eklund <eivind@yes.no>
To:        Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>
Cc:        Matthew Hunt <mph@FreeBSD.ORG>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG, cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG, cvs-ports@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: ports/www/ijb - Imported sources
Message-ID:  <19980504003356.43232@follo.net>
In-Reply-To: <12391.894232835@critter.freebsd.dk>; from Poul-Henning Kamp on Mon, May 04, 1998 at 12:00:35AM %2B0200
References:  <19980503230438.48318@follo.net> <12391.894232835@critter.freebsd.dk>

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On Mon, May 04, 1998 at 12:00:35AM +0200, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> In message <19980503230438.48318@follo.net>, Eivind Eklund writes:
>>>    Log Message:
>>>    Import of ijb, the Internet Junkbuster.  It's an HTTP proxy that
>>>    strips advertisements and so on.
>> 
>> Should't this be under ATT (for "Automated Theft Tool")? ;-)
>> 
>> Refusing to download ads from the WWW is very bad practice.  Those ads are
>> paying for the service you're using.  I'm not even certain we should have
>> the above program as a port - I don't think we'd have a 'automated
>> crack-on-download' tool, for instance, and this is actually fairly similar.
> 
> I disagree with you on this:
> 
> First:
> ------
> If I used Lynx I wouldn't see the ads.  From this we can deduce that
> people pay for having their ads placed, but not for having them read.

This is quite incorrect.  There are three advertising models in broad
use on the web today - pay per impression (usually counted in
thosands as 'CPM'), pay per click-through, and pay per action.

Pay-per-impression is counted by seeing how many times the advert is
downloaded, and paying for each of these.  Here you're robbing the
web-site you're visiting of direct revenue.

'Pay-per-click-through' is payment made for each time you go through a
banner.  This is (wild estimate) perhaps 3% the size of
pay-per-impression, counted in dollars.  Ads under this model tend to
generate between 1/2 and 1/10 the revenue of the pay-per-impression
model (in my experience, which is admittedly limited).

Pay-per-action is payment made against the originating site when you
actually do a purchase.  This is e.g. the model Amazon uses for its
partners - each time somebody buy a book through an Amazon partner,
the partner get part of the revenue.  Another wild estimate: 1% the
size of the pay-per-impression market, in dollars.

> (This is exactly the same as the ads in any magazine, the magzine 
> publishes the ads, but they do not guarantee that I will not simply
> skip those pages when I read the magazine.)

They give a statistical average for how many 'impressions' the ad will
generate - how many people that will see it.  In some cases, they're
in on a pay-per-action deal, but that is more common on television
(e.g, the CNN hotels adverts and almost certainly the MTV collections
CD adverts).

A paper or magazine without adverts would cost you 3 times what you
pay now; a commercial web-site without advertising either would cost
money or wouldn't be there.

> Second:
> -------
> As this is an "opt-in" thing, I can always choose to see the ads if
> I want to.  I'm not wilfully depriving anybody of their daily dosis
> of fancy animated graphics promising creditcards being offered
> exclusively to just about anybody, hair-growth formula or domain
> hosting on linux servers in somebodys bedroom.

Of course not.  You're denying them (in the long term) getting such
services as Yahoo! and Netscape Netcenter for free, or at least making
that business model less viable.  I'm not saying we shouldn't provide
the choice of being stupid (ie, not supporting the web-sites you
read), but I think we shouldn't actively promote it.

> Third:
> ------
> FreeBSD is in the business of providing tools for people, we're not
> in the business of setting their policies.

I disagree.  We're clearly in the business of setting policies - ie,
which tools we include in the base system is part of setting policy
for the sites that install it, and not having rootkits in the ports
collection is setting policy.

The question is how far we should go in setting policy - and I believe
that encouraging people to block advertisments on the web is clearly
destructive, and contrary to our purposes (limiting the use of the web
for advertising for FreeBSD).  I won't say that we shouldn't have ijb
in the ports collection, but I don't think we should have it with a
description encouraging people to 'pirate websites' - ie, browse
without giving the site their advertising displays.

Eivind.

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