Fighting Ad Blockers With Captcha Ads 450
krou writes "Living in an ad-free internet thanks to ad blockers? That could be a thing of the past if software firm NuCaptcha has their way by making captchas into ads. 'Instead of the traditional squiggly word that users have to decipher, the new system shows them a video advert with a short message scrolling across it. The user has to identify and retype part of the message to proceed. Companies including Electronic Arts, Wrigley and Disney have already signed up.'"
I'm not worried. (Score:3, Interesting)
ads don't make you buy stuff... (Score:3, Interesting)
...your lack of self-control, willpower, and independent thought makes you buy stuff after seeing an ad.
And because adverts essentially prey on weakness and are almost universally designed to mislead, it is quite simple to set your policy to being discouraged by any ad you see from purchasing from the sponsor.
So, it's advert blocking all the way, and anything which manages to slip through is avoided with extreme prejudice.
Also, don't forget that the real word in recaptcha is always "faeces". Stop doing free work for the biggest polluter of the Internet with adverts.
Gee. Another website I can live without (Score:4, Interesting)
My response will be simple.
Here's another website I can live without. There are very, very few site I frequent that I honestly need (my webmail, and... and... I'll think of something).
Seriously, I would expect these to be traffic killers.
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? Even if these captchas actually turn out easier to use than the current ones? I mean no more guesstimating which bit of what overlapping miscoloured squiggles belong to which potential letters (and is that a 1 or an l? O or 0?), just a quick message and an easily identifiable word within it.
Or, to rephrase the question: would you oppose the system if it wasn't about ads but just another innovation in captchas? Assuming, of course, that this innovation does actually make captchas less of a hassle. Just sayin' that this isn't necessarily bad and you might find that the benefits outweigh the agony of having to listen to an ad message (is that really so bad?).
Personally though, I don't think it's going to work, neither as an ad nor as a captcha. If it's based on videos with meaningful messages (ads!), the possibilities for remixing and regenerating random captchas is going to be severely limited. Which means it will take no time at all until someone has built a plugin that builds a database of these and simply looks up the correct answer in the background.
Re:Gee. Another website I can live without (Score:2, Interesting)
I have the same reaction to those ads that underline random words with some JavaScript stuff. I avoid The Inquirer and Phoronix because they use this form of advertising. The Inquirer used to be one of my news feeds, so they'd get me reading half a dozen or so articles a day. Putting in these ads made me delete them and I've not visited the site since then.
I probably wouldn't mind if they'd highlight relevant words, but when they're making things like 'software' and 'smartphone' the context words for ads, it's just silly. These sites get a line in my user CSS file so any link to them has a warning appended telling me that I will be irritated by ads if I click on them. Usually, this makes me just skip over them and not click.
Why bother? (Score:3, Interesting)
At that point, why not just go ahead and use a paywall?
Anything so interesting that I'm willing to spend my attention span deactivating the advertisement filter (hint: not much, with so many free alternatives for content) and paying attention would probably be worth paying to see. And any payment I'm willing to make, no matter how small, is likely to exceed the pittance a single ad impression (even a verified one) is worth.
Re:A sure-fire way to make me HATE your product (Score:2, Interesting)
As a kid watching Disney titles (on betamax) I used to enjoy the trailers... even for my favourite video winnie the pooh which I watched over and over again, the trailers were very much part of the experience and I refused to let my dad fast forward through them... funny how things change huh?
Re:A sure-fire way to make me HATE your product (Score:1, Interesting)
Back then, the trailers were not of some gangster pulling out a pistol and bumping someone off, with the caption, "You don't murder people. Why do you steal music?" or whatever the garbage is. I paid for the media; I don't need to have thief 101 lectures. In fact the torrents likely have that crap removed. To boot, to watch it without that crap and 30-45 minutes of other stuff, I end up just pulling out handbrake and ripping it so I can see the movie I paid for, not irrelevant garbage or morality lectures. I paid for the product; I don't need lectures on theft.
I see this as a GOOD thing, (Score:4, Interesting)
because it will shortly result in major advances in image recognition/parsing technology. I foresee a Firefox addon that will hide the 'ad-CAPTCHA', substituting a button for the user to click on. The CAPTCHA recognition process will happen transparently. Of course this will break CAPTCHA altogether, but we can lay that one at the feet of the advertising industry.
Never underestimate the power of a pissed-off programmer when faced with the 'all your eyeballs are belong to us' attitude of some arrogant advertising wonk.
Re:A sure-fire way to make me HATE your product (Score:3, Interesting)
What determines how much you are willing to pay? How do you determine which features are must-have? If you think those decisions are not being constantly manipulated by others, guess again.
If I did that, I'd want car with two seats but a lot of luggage space, with just enough torque to get around UK B-roads at a sensible pace, that was priced at cost plus a sensible margin, and weighed less than 1000kg. In fact there are a large number of households that should want this as a perfect second car. There is no such car even though it's perfectly possible to engineer one. What does that tell you about consumer choice?
Re:A sure-fire way to make me HATE your product (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, take this one [youtube.com] for instance. Who cares what's it advertising? It's one of those things that's just great for showing people and watching their reaction.
Re:A sure-fire way to make me HATE your product (Score:5, Interesting)
Because then I would cry bloody murder, since to target ads you first of all have to find out more about me than I'm willing to give to advertising companies.
Also, tasteful, inoffensive ads are considered "worthless" by advertisers because they, well, they are tasteful and inoffensive, they get overlooked and are easily forgotten.
Instead, they try to force ads onto us. Ignoring the old tale of sun and wind competing over who can make a man take off his coat (in a nutshell, wind tries to blow it off the guy but he only pulled it tighter around his body, while sun shined and convinced the guy by giving him what he wanted, i.e. warmth, that the coat is unnecessary), which fits more aptly here than anywhere else: Ads have to give you what you want! Else they may be as invasive as can be, they will still not result in the desired spectator action: Going out and buying whatever is advertised. Worse, an invasive ad for a product I might want to have will immediately receive a negative reaction because it interrupted whatever else I wanted to do at the time, or, worse, startled me and hence got connected with a negative emotion, something that it entirely deadly for any kind of advertising.
A good ad would do both: Be noticable, but not distracting and not a roadblock on my way to the content I wanted. Pop-unders are already a pretty good solution, since you get to notice them once you are done looking at the content you wanted to see, are in a relaxed mood and maybe open to look at something else.
Personally, I think advertisers who think that cramming stuff down my throat think pretty lowly of their own product. It almost seems like they themselves would not want it, so they assume you have to sell it hard so anyone would would at least "accidently" buy it.
Re:A sure-fire way to make me HATE your product (Score:3, Interesting)
I block ads because they're in flash
What do you plan to do once ads start to be delivered through HTML5 instead of SWF? This is already happening: see cpalead.
Re:Yes and no (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A sure-fire way to make me HATE your product (Score:2, Interesting)
What determines how much you are willing to pay?
Never ever more than $1000AU.
How do you determine which features are must-have?
My only must haves are that it starts/stops, has good fuel economy, and that the body is roughly straight.
If you think those decisions are not being constantly manipulated by others, guess again.
I can honestly say that no one has ever manipulated any of my car buying decisions. There used to be an advertisement here in AU that pushed the idea that your car would be the second biggest purchase of your life(a house being the first I guess). Most of the people I knew at the time would have agreed wholeheartedly. I cannot remember anyone ever ever asking ' Why? '.