Bruce Lawson's personal site

At SynergyFest Mobile World Congress, I was asked a number of times whether Opera is looking at Ad Blockers and my general opinion of Ads. Here’s what I replied (with the BIG FAT DISCLAIMER that this is my personal opinion, and not that of Opera).

Firstly, yes; Opera is looking at Ad Blocking, and has been for quite a while (you’ll find lots of popular adblockers in our desktop extensions store). We know that Ads slow down the Web, and for many users, they’re expensive: the New York Times reported

Visiting the home page of Boston.com every day for a month would cost the equivalent of about $9.50 in data usage just for the ads.

Many Opera users in emerging economies pay much more of their income for web access than I do in the UK, and we want to make the web more affordable for those people.

(The fact that we’re looking at it shouldn’t be taken as a commitment to anything, by the way. We look at everything our consumers demand and our competitors implement, of course.)

But let’s talk about ads themselves. “Ads are evil” isn’t an mature argument; we need to be more nuanced than that.

For example, the other day I was reading a serious political article. Underneath it was a “related article” – just some clickbait nonsense about “The Best Breasts of 2015”, designed to sell advertising, and paginating excessively in order to maximise “hits” (whatever that means) and worsening the user experience. Now, I’ve got nothing against breasts (in fact, I’m at the age when I’m growing my own) but this is preposterous crap and deserves to die in a fire.

Later, I was reading a blog post about a band I like, and in it was a text ad, telling me that the band were playing near me the week later. I didn’t know that, so clicked through and bought a ticket – and the gig was very good.

Both were ads; one was stupid, the other was very useful. What’s the difference? To me, it was intrusiveness and (related to that) contextuality. An ad about a band next to an article about the band is highly contextual, and thus less intrusive. That it was a text ad, so light to download, made it less intrusive too, because it didn’t delay the page loading or make the screen reformat. Neither did it autoplay a heavy video, make noise or obscure the content.

So the challenge for Ad blocking is to block the crap and allow the good. I don’t know if anyone knows how to do that infallibly.

There’s also the question of revenues. We’ve been trained to expect “free” content on the web, and that’s largely paid for by ads. Before I joined Opera and became an Internet Tycoon/ over-promoted gobshite (delete as you see fit), I had a reasonably popular blog. (This very one! And still the same 2003 design!)

Because it was reasonably popular, I paid a fair amount of money for server costs etc. As sole breadwinner with two young children, those costs were a burden, so I ran ads which paid my hosting and bought me a few pints. I don’t know that I would have pulled the plug without those ads (I like the sound of my own voice too much) but other people in my situation might, and it would be a huge loss to the Web – and therefore to consumers – if independent content producers’ voices disappeared as a result of advertising revenues drying up.

So, Ad-blocking is a must, I think. But it needs to be done intelligently, and (probably) over a few iterations before we (Opera, and the wider web ecosystem) get it right. And if that encourages the advertising industry to do their work with less intrusive, bandwidth-hogging nonsense, and therefore more utility (to consumers and to their clients), we’ll all gain.

Update

Since I wrote this, Opera released a developer build of our desktop browser, with a built-in ad blocker that makes sites about 50% faster, and some 90% faster.

This led to good conversations about ads, publishers’ revenue and how the industry is changing:

• A Never-Ending Story On Ad-Blockers by Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Mag
• On ads and ad blocking – another Publisher’s perspective, by Andrew Betts (who rightly calls me “one of the world’s top sevem most glamorous people”) of Financial Times “which makes part of its money from advertising”
• Fifth of UK adults block ads – “45% of respondents said they would be less likely to block ads if these didn’t interfere with what they were doing”
• Tips and Myths About Extending Smartphone Battery Life – “Installing an ad blocker will greatly extend battery life” (with some numbers)
• Crypto-ransomware Spreads via Poisoned Ads on Major Websites
• Ads on news sites gobble up as much as 79% of users’ mobile data
• Facebook is eating the world – a lecture by Emily Bell published in the Columbia Journalism Review
• Sweden’s publishers are joining forces to simultaneously block ad-block users – “people with blockers installed won’t be able to view content unless they disable their ad blocker. They’ll also be given the choice of paying small one-off payments to access the content or viewing the content at lower quality.”
• Reasons to Use Ad-Blockers by Kagan Mactane: “If you think people using ad blockers are just anti-ad or want to freeload on publishers, you’re completely missing the point.”

(Last Updated on 29 March 2016)

• Subgrids thinking out loud – “our thoughts about subgrids feature from CSS Grid Layout specification”, by Igalia, who are implementing Grids in Blink
• More Chinese Mobile UI Trends
• Chrome change breaks the visual viewport writes PPK
• Progressive Web Apps – a list compiled by Opera Developer Relations. Your’s isn’t on the list? Add it.
• Font Metrics API – explainer for the (very nascent) Font Metrics API in CSS/ Houdini. anything missing? Raise an issue, do. We need real developer input.
• Why I love working with the web by Remy Sharp. “If you sit back for a moment, and think about just how many lives you can touch simply by publishing something, anything, to the web, it’s utterly mind blowing. That’s why I love working with the web”
• Indian firm launches£5 smartphone, thought to be world’s cheapest
• A Message to Our Customers Apple’s Tim Cook: “[The FBI] have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.” Time magazine has good analysis: This Is the Real Reason Apple Is Fighting the FBI
• GCHQ hacking does not breach human rights, security tribunal rules – “remotely activating microphones and cameras on electronic devices without the owners’ knowledge, is legal”. WTF?
• Snoopers scolded UK parliamentary committee “blasts government surveillance plans” calling them ‘incomprehensible”, too sweeping and needing justifying
• How to prepare and write a tech conference talk – loads of good stuff in this post by Lena Reinhard

Literally trillions* of people asked me “Bruce, how do Smart Alerts in Opera Max work?”. So I blew Opera’s video budget on this 2 min explainer, featuring an eggbox and a Where The Wild Things Are puppet.

(*metaphorically trillions)

I’ve had a few tweets, DMs and emails asking about the proposed buy-out of Opera by a Chinese consortium. Here are some answers to your questions (none of this is new; it’s publicly available in Lars’ statements to the press and Opera’s consumer blogs, but I know that many of you are techies who won’t necessarily read those). I apologise for not getting back to you earlier; the news broke on my last day of a press tour of India and I only got back yesterday.

Firstly, it’s not a done deal. An offer has been made, and Opera’s board has recommended that shareholders accept it. But shareholders need to vote and governments need to be consulted.

If the deal goes through, the shareholders change (because current shareholders would sell their shares to the Chinese consortium) but, as Nuno Sitima (Opera’s Lord of Mobile Stuff) wrote,

the people behind Opera remain the same. The same teams will be developing and delivering the [products].

Many of you asked why we’re doing this. It gives Opera access to 500 million Chinese customers of the consortium, and investment to grow bigger. I am not a Biz Guy so I’ll just quote the press release:

The transaction would give Opera access to the extensive internet user base of Kunlun and Qihoo in China as well as the financing and other support of the Consortium that would allow for the full potential of the Company to be realized.

Lastly, and most importantly, I’ve had Opera customers ask about the security and privacy of their data. The answer is simple, and reassuring (I hope):

Assuming the deal goes through (see first point above), Opera plans to continue operating as a stand-alone company (see Nuno’s quote above). We are a Norwegian company subject to Norwegian (EU/EEA) privacy laws. Our shareholders may change but our legal obligations in this respect will not. All data will continue to be handled in accordance with our Norwegian legal obligations ”” nothing changes in this respect.

(And, yes, I remain employed; thanks to all of you who asked after me personally and offered me other jobs. But, honestly, despite still looking great in a mankini, my pole-dancing days are behind me.)