Ad-​​Block, Game Theory and The Guardian

I read two blog posts this morning that seemed to be crying-​​out to be con­nected together. So all credit to their authors, and a tiny bit to me for the meeting.

The first was by Jamie Madigan, who writes the terrific Psychology of Video Games blog, looking into the reasons people do (or don’t) behave badly in mul­ti­player video­games. People discover little cheats in video­games that can advance their score but annoy everyone else. Whether to use them anyway is an example of the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’. According to Game Theory, the dominant strategy is to use these cheats.

[Explication: your opponent has the option to use the cheat as well. If they do, and you don’t, you lose. If you do, and they don’t, you win. If you both do, then it’s equal. The worst that can happen from using the cheat is that the stakes are even. On the other hand, if you don’t use the cheat, then the worst that can happen is you losing. That’s worse than the stakes being even: so use the cheat.]

However, the con­sequences of everyone using the cheats is mayhem and no fun for anyone, so it’s actually also an undesir­able outcome, but less undesir­able than losing. Everyone cheating rather than playing the game properly. But so long as the strategy exists and can be executed in a way that’s undetected, the rational decision is to continue the abuse. The way to coun­teract this for developers and pub­lishers is to close down the cheat strategies or pub­lic­ally identify the abusers so that future poten­tial oppon­ents will either (a) avoid them or (b) use the same strategies as the abusers. Identification and iter­a­tion of the same game con­di­tions turns the short-​​term gain into a long-​​term loss*. Creating a state of uncer­tainty over whether abusers will/​can be iden­ti­fied can also work.

[*Actually, the maths says that con­tinuing to cheat still remains dominant, even when the cards are on the table, but humans are rarely math­em­at­ical creatures. People are com­plic­ated and irra­tional: winning isn’t always the overall goal for them. Some people don’t play the dominant strategy anyway, because of a sense of honour or fair-​​play. On the other hand, some people always will, despite the con­sequences, because they don’t care. (They’re ‘griefers’ in video­game jargon).]

The second post was by Bobbie Johnson on the Guardian website about the Firefox and Chrome exten­sion Ad-​​Block. If you use Ad-​​Block, then it stops the advert­ising banners and MPUs on websites from loading. That makes for a faster and smoother browsing exper­i­ence for you as an indi­vidual. However, the websites that you are looking at lose revenue, since they probably sell their advert­ising on a CPM basis – cost per thousand views – it doesn’t matter whether you click on the ads or not. Not all ads are intended to be clicked on anyway, such as branding campaigns.

If everyone Ad-​​Blocks, then the site you love goes out of business. If no-​​one does, then it thrives. The ‘cheat’ is the idea that Ad-​​Block is still pretty-​​much a secret, or that most other people are more hon­our­able than you. That you can block advert­ise­ments, but because hardly anyone else is using it, then the sites will still be OK.

So here’s the oblig­atory 2x2 matrix:

The best outcome is that your favourite sites prosper and continue, and you don’t have to see the adverts. The worst — the ‘everyone cheats but me’ scenario -  is that they go bust despite you not fil­tering ads yourself. The dominant strategy is to Ad-​​Block and hope very few other people do that as well. It will continue to be dominant until enough of us perceive free web media as a long-​​term game, are iden­ti­fied as free-​​riders or learn the con­sequences to our short-​​term victory.

We want sites to prosper, yes? So what do they/​we need to do? They need to make viewing and inter­acting with their content a long-​​term game. Part of that is achieved by Bobbie’s column – if Ad-​​Block is worthy of a column in the Guardian, then it’s cer­tainly not some sort of hacker secret anymore. It is the most-​​downloaded Firefox Add-​​on and the leading Chrome Extension. Any cer­tainty that ‘everyone else’ will play a dom­in­ated strategy ought to dis­ap­pear. Thus, the ‘best’ outcome, where you get a free ride on sites that prosper has gone. Take that out of the picture and the game looks rather dif­ferent: playing fairly together is the new best option. They should probably publish figures on the footer of every page of the revenue lost to filters; maybe scale that into an ‘articles we were unable to com­mis­sion this month’ widget, if the loss is large enough. Arguably, it should be possible to identify the users of Ad-​​Block (if it isn’t already) and serve them altered content.

We need to switch off the exten­sion, with the recog­ni­tion that this is a long game, even if our iden­tities remain masked: it’s the future of free media on the Web. Our best outcome is a free-​​ride, on sites that are free-​​to-​​access anyway. The worst outcome is our favourite sites going bust.

With long-​​termism brought to the front of our minds, the best outcome is removing a little incon­veni­ence; the worst would be a disaster.

picture credit: HDR cafe

[As you might be tempted to point out: I used to use Ad-​​Block but I have stopped].

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