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  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  55
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.
What does the word "murky" underlined in Paragraph 7 mean?
选项 A、Obscure.
B、Somber.
C、Gloomy.
D、Ambiguous.
答案A
解析 murky意为“模糊的，含糊的”，故A项Obscure(模糊的；晦涩的)符合题意，正确答案为A项。B项“昏暗的；忧郁的”、C项“沮丧的；阴郁的”和D项“模棱两可的”，均不符合题意。
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