2. 外语
  3. On the Internet, ads are a real problem. They’re a problem for us, the people, and not just because they clutter up our Web page

On the Internet, ads are a real problem. They’re a problem for us, the people, and not just because they clutter up our Web page

admin2023-01-17  25
问题     On the Internet, ads are a real problem. They’re a problem for us, the people, and not just because they clutter up our Web pages, they also cost us money (in mobile data charges), battery life and time. Surprisingly, they’re also a problem for advertisers and websites. Suddenly the popularity of ad-blocking software has reached a tipping point. According to a study by Adobe and PageFair (which offers anti-ad-blocking services), 41 percent of adults younger than 30 use these blockers. Overall, ad-blocker installations are up 48 percent in a year—and that was before Apple began approving ad-blocking apps for the iPhone and iPad last September, marking ad blocking has come to the mobile world for the first time in a huge way.
    The tiling is, most of those free articles, videos and services you enjoy are brought to you by the advertising. If you’re not seeing the ads, then the central financial transaction of the online content economy collapses. What then?
    Some websites appeal to visitors directly, asking you to view the ads. Last summer Wired. com’s home page said, "Please do us a favor and disable your ad blocker." Other sites simply turn you away if you have an ad blocker installed. The sites for leading UK broadcasters Channel 4 and ITV present a dark screen.
    Enter ad-blocker-blocking technology—Web software that tries to fool the ad blockers so that the ads appear despite your blocker. Some companies that operate ad blockers even accept money from large advertisers, although they deny giving ads from those companies’ special treatment.
    But these tactics treat the public as the enemy. They create a technology arms race. "You will see our ads, like it or not! Advertising executives may tell you that one solution may be native advertising: ads dressed up as articles. They’re displayed as actual stories or videos rather than splashy ads, so they pass through ad blockers. These can lead to some murky territory, however, blurring the line between traditional content and content aiming to sell you something.
    So tech Utopians like me wonder why the answer isn’t micropayments. You know, instead of looking at ads, you’re automatically billed a few cents for each article you read or video you watch. Unfortunately, in the late 1990s and early 2000s a bunch of companies tried to invent micropayment systems; all of them failed.
    To find out why, I tracked down the CEOs of some of the startups who have all moved on to other endeavors. "Micropayments sound great on paper," former BitPass CEO Douglas Knopper told me. "But in practice, they require four things for the consumer that are hard to pull off: simplicity, ubiquity, security—and it has to be free. The economics to the retailer don’t work, because there are too many middlemen—credit card processors, etc. So until someone figures out how to crack the code… micropayments aren’t going to get any traction."
    The timing was wrong, too. Charles Cohen, founder of failed micropayment company Beenz, told me that these efforts mostly died because the dot-com bubble burst, and most of the companies who were accepting and issuing our microcurrency went up in a puff of smoke.
    So micropayments may face an uphill battle, but there aren’t any screamingly obvious reasons why they couldn’t work now. It seems Web companies would be happy to get out of the ad-blocking arms race, while Web users, well, we wouldn’t mind paying a few cents here and there to never encounter another intrusive banner ad or slow-to-load video ad.
Which of the following can be the title of this passage?
选项 A、The Popularity of Ad-Blocker Technology
B、The Problems Caused by Online Ads
C、The Way to Banish Online Ads
D、The Failure of Micropayments
答案C
解析 作者在开篇提出网络广告是个大问题，进而提出解决该问题的方法是拦截插件和微支付，随后作者讨论这两种方法存在的问题。通过分析文章脉络可知，本文关键是网络广告。A项“广告拦截技术的受欢迎度”，文中只是略为提及，表述不能统领全文，排除。B项“网络广告带来的麻烦”虽在文章第一段提及了，但文章关心的不是后果，而是如何解决这个麻烦，故排除。D项“微支付的失败”，虽然文章后半部分写了许多这方面的内容，但是前半部分却是谈及广告拦截插件，所以该表述也不能统领全文，也排除。
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