Not Enough Ads? Install Adbar.

An anonymous reader writes "Jesse Ruderman brings the worst feature of Opera, Advertisements, to Firefox with his extension Adbar. According to the page, 'adbar displays Google ads related to pages you view. Because the ads are relevant, they are occasionally useful. When adbar isn't displaying ads from Google, it displays Firefox-related things such as silly Firefox slogans, ads for other Mozilla software, and requests for donations to the Mozilla Foundation.'"

I hate to admit this...

[Osrin]

but I've been using gmail for a number of months now, and I'm finding their targeted advertising more and more helpful.

I guess I've officially lost at the internet.

Google is a special case

[tjlsmith]

It's ads are actually GOOD - I've learned to pay attention to them when on Google. I might get this adbar...

Resolution to burn

[Bullseye_blam]

Sorry, I prefer to keep my [very limited] desktop space.

Thanks anyway!

-Bullseye

Re:Well

[parksie]

To me, it seems like the same thing as buying a trade magazine (say, Micro Mart in the UK). You are specifically *asking* for adverts on what you're looking at; in effect advertising yourself as a potential and interested buyer.

Re:I hate to admit this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using gmail for a number of months now, and I'm finding their targeted advertising more and more helpful

Whats the going rate per astroturf post these days?

I mean, for posters, as well as for moderators?

Re:pathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not us. It's the editors.

Re:Well

[Achoi77]

*woah* did you just insult a 2-digit UID? :-P

All jocking aside, I beleive when grandparent says high moral road he's referring to is adware applications that don't hijack your computer, putting on excess bloat eventually rendering your computer useless on order to force their ads upon you.

Personally I've enjoyed using google's ads, as they offer me more or less the most relevant stuff I'm looking for during my surfing session. If this thing even gets popular, perhaps there will be less and less browser spamming, less pop-ups, less harassment over all. Ok I'll stop dreaming now.

In any case, I find google's ads very non-intrusive, and very relevant - those are the kind of ads I like to see.

My philosophy

[sn0wflake]

Ads cost money. Whenever I see an ad for a product or service I automatically think that there must be a competing product that's cheaper. If there's no competitor then why advertise?

Re:Yeah, ok.

[zonker]

btw, opera only displays ads in the unpaid mode (kinda like eudora), once you register it the ads are gone...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:That's the thing about ads

[killjoe]

"I accept the usefulness and necessity of ads for providing "free" access to some information that would not otherwise be free of direct cost (or even possible) otherwise"

I just want to point out that it's not "free". Since somebody is paying for the ad that cost is reflected in the price of everything you buy. It's not free, you just pay for it some other time when you buy some product or another.

Gah.

[amalcon]

I always hate to see people actually go for something like this. Advertising is the one industry which provides nothing of value to society. The only ones who gain from advertising are medium to large businesses, as they are the only ones with the investment capital to saturate the market.

That said, if these people can get anyone to fall for this, more power to them. That's capitalism. At least they are up front about it, and not sneaky and underhanded like Gator & the like.

Re:Targeted Ads, eh?

[Stevyn]

From what I've seen on slashdot, you'll see more ads about how .NET is the best thing since...well...nothing. Ads run the internet. It's a plain and simple fact. There is no way most websites could afford to stay up if it wasn't for ad revenue. And the only way to maximize efficiency is to target the ads specifically to the people who are going to view them. That's why there are so many microsoft ads on this website. But what do I care, it's not going to sway the moderation system so it's not going to make slashdot into another C|NET.

Dealing with ads on the internet is like dealing with commercials on television. Accept them and move on.

Re:I will personally kill....

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd disagree with #3. It's obviously in the spirit of open source; not only was it made possible by Mozilla's extension support and open source code, it even comes available in 3 flavors of open source licenses.

I'm surprised at all the knee-jerk anti-ad reactions in the comment sections. You don't even need to RTFA to realize this is a piece of sarcastic joke-ware. If I made an extension that fed you pr0n and asked for your credit number every 5 seconds, I'm sure people would be complaining about that, too.

Re:My philosophy

[p0rnking]

Why advertise if there's no cpmpeting product?
What if your product is one of a kind?
Advertising can do many things, and one is to make people aware of what it's advertising. And without advertising, how are people going to know about it (these are bad examples, but products such as the foreman grill, and boflex, which are sold only through advertisements)

Re:Google is a special case

[Sancho]

That's kind of interesting...

MOST of the time, ads are targetted in this way (these days). If you go to a gaming review site, the ads on there are about games. If you go to a sex site, the ads on there are about ... sex sites. Ads targetting the content you're viewing is a very old idea. What's unique about Google ads is that they are on the search engine, so if you search about games, there are ads about games. I don't see how having a google ad on every webpage you visit would be much different from those very webpages offering targetted advertising, except MAYBE that you're helping Google get a little extra spending money (didn't read the article, not sure if they benefit from this plugin or not.)

Re:Well

[halowolf]

All jocking aside, I beleive when grandparent says high moral road he's referring to is adware applications that don't hijack your computer, putting on excess bloat eventually rendering your computer useless on order to force their ads upon you.

Personally, I don't mind getting ads that are relevant and on my own terms. For some reason I quite enjoy looking at shopping catalogues and stuff even though 99% of the time I wouldn't buy anything from them. If there is something that I may be interested in then I don't mind being told about it.

For instance I've got my Amazon recommendations list as part of the Mozilla Browser home tab group. I don't always look at it but I do find something on it every now and then that I am interested in, and best of all it learns my preferences and offers more relevant results. Though it does tend do go off in unexpected directions and makes some less than relevant selected obviously based on keyword association.

Whats important for me is that the advertising is on my terms and not on the terms of someone else. I rarely watch any TV at the time is on and simply time shift it to where I can easily bypass the ads.

I've worked for a number of marketing departments now and every one of them has been focused on getting into the customers mindset anyway they can. None of them seemed concerned about annoying potential customers with advertising that they didn't want. They would run competitions so they could harvest contact details to advertise to consumers with and such and they got mightily offended when I compared their "directed marketing" to SPAM. Oh well...

Re:Sometimes people actually want ads

[MikeCapone]

When you are shopping for something, what you should be looking for is reliable information, not ads.

I sure as hell will never buy a car or anything pricey based on publicity.. Yeah, yeah, they are all car of the year, all have cheap prices (until you read the fine print), etc.

Re:FYI

[misleb]

All you are going to end up with is Adbar AND Gator on your computer. There is no reason to believe that Adbar would replace any other type of advertising. It would just amount to MORE advertising on the Internet. Ads in adbar as well as ads embedded in the site itself. See, the sites you visit want to make money too. It isn't like the money Google would get from this would somehow trickle down to other sites.

Voluntarily installing adbar is stupid. It would be like installing a device that sits on top of your TV and scrolls advertisements while you watch shows... that also have advertisment.

Re:Sometimes people actually want ads

[misleb]

I'm sorry, but that has to be the most retarded method of "shopping" I have ever heard of. Advertisments are NOT there to inform you. They are there to mislead you into buying something you wouldn't otherwise buy. If you want to buy an appliance you should be searching the most unbiased consumer oriented sources you can find like Consumer Reports (although even those have been tainted by corporate influences). An informed, responsible consumer does not let advertisement directly influence their purchasing decisions. Advertisements are untrustworthy and insidious. We should be working as hard as possible to get them out of our lives... not invite them in. But I guess that is just me projecting my own opinions onto others. :-P

Re:Get rid of the ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a joke.

Re:Useful Joke

[TiggsPanther]

People don't have a problem with advertisement-sponsored content itself (well, some do, but fuck 'em).

Yes, some do. And for varying reasons.

For one thing I find ad-banners (even non-popups) annoying because if I could afford whatever they're advertising I'd probably have paid for the product/site subscription in the first place.

The other thing is that too many sites farm out their advertising space to someone else. This means that if I'm trying to read a site in a hurry the local content is delayed whilst they wait for some third-party server having a bad day to deliver its crap to my browser.

Tiggs

Re:My philosophy

[Ibanez]

Yeah, uh...not very insightful. In fact, Marketing/Business/Not Being An Idiot 101 would put the number one reason for advertising at:

Knowledge of product/service.

Why? Who the hell cares if there's a cheaper alternative if you don't know a product exists? And since when does cheaper mean better? Do you live in a little one room shack with a black and white portable TV and a Lindows box from Walmart?

Honestly, if Coke releases a new soda, how are you going to find out about it if they don't advertise? Only other two ways I can think of is perhaps stumbling upon it in a store or word of mouth. Neither is a fast form of advertising. TV ads? A multi-million dollar ad campaigns spreads knowledge of a product quite a bit faster, wouldn't you say? Sure, there's always good 'ole Dr. Rite you can go grab thats cheaper. But does that mean its better?

If I invent a revolutionary product, what do you think I'm gonna do? Sit on it and tell a few friends? Probably not...If its revolutionary it has no competitors (Well, more likely than not), and I'm sure as hell gonna spend a lot to advertise it.

Hell, I could go on for twenty minutes just giving some Advertising 101 lessons, and I've only had high school marketing. I mean, don't even get me started with product reinforcement, etc.

Blake

Re:Flawed analogy

[eric76]

Does Opera have the right to forward me ads because I bought their product?

You must not have tried Opera. If you pay for the license, you don't get the ads. If you don't want to pay, then you get the ads.

I like Opera enough that I did pay for the license. Actually, two licenses - one for Windows and one for Linux.

Personally, I have no problem with a software package having two modes - 1) free but you put up with advertizing and 2) pay with no advertizing.

If the ads are too annoying, I'll never put up with it long enough to decide whether or not I like it enough to pay for it so that there is no advertizing.

Unfair to Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

This story is very unfair to Opera. You get ads if you use the fully featured free version of Opera and it even gives you a choice between the types of adverts.

Not all software is free.

Re:Well

[pilybaby]

To me, it seems like the same thing as buying a trade magazine (say, Micro Mart in the UK). You are specifically *asking* for adverts on what you're looking at; in effect advertising yourself as a potential and interested buyer.

Same with almost all mass media. The big guys are big guys because they can subsidise the cost of unit production through selling advertising. Thus the massivly popular labour and union papers that used to be around were brought down explicitly because they didn't sell advertising space and thus couldn't compete on price. Unfortunatly, as soon as one person does it the rest are forced to follow. It's a shame really as I think it's destroyed the news media in the western world (I can't vouch for other parts of the world).

Re:Well

[CaptainZapp]

None of them seemed concerned about annoying potential customers with advertising that they didn't want.

That's what always utterly mystified my about marketing dweebs:

Maybe I'm different then other folks, but annoy me only once, be it by a dumb, sexist, racist adds, by an insult of my intelligence, by rotten customer service, or by a flashy awfully colored popup blurting "HELLO, YOU HAVE HEMEROIDS!!!" into my general direction and you can bank on the fact that you lost my business...

...forever

(OK, it gets kind of difficult to live up to ones principles when dealing with phone companies, but you get the gist)

Does no-one in this thread think it's a joke?

[brainburger]

Does no-one in this thread think it's a joke? It appears to be functional, but it is clearly humourous, satirical, ironic - that kind of thing. Hats off to them.

Re:Well

[WuphonsReach]

That's what always utterly mystified my about marketing dweebs:

I think the idea is that there are enough *other* rubes out there, that your lost business can be blamed on "poor market conditions". Plus, if you're a critical-thinking person, you're not really a good consumer anyway (they want impulse buyers of expensive things like cars, boats, hair gel).

Good Idea, Actually

[cgreuter]

Yeah, I realize that the extension is a joke, but something like it would actually be a good idea. If the ad views actually earned money for the Mozilla foundation, people could voluntarily(!) install the adbar as a cashless donation. A lot of people who wouldn't want to pay money for a web browser--even if it's a voluntary donation--may be willing to view ads instead.

It's certainly worth trying, anyway.