Adblock Plus Developers To Allow 'Acceptable' Ads 247
First time accepted submitter Roman Grazhdan writes "Developers of Adblock Plus, an award-winning add-on for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome boasting over 12,000,000 users, announced that starting from version 2.0 the extension would come with a white list of unobtrusive, privacy-respected ads. These will be allowed by default; users will still be able to block them by unchecking 'Allow non-intrusive advertising.' The developers say: 'Only 25% of the Adblock Plus users seem to be strictly against any advertising.' What is this — betrayal of ideals of annoyance-free web or birth of independent authority for standards for advertisement?" Ads are sometimes annoying, but they also make certain websites (like this one!) possible. Getting the balance right is tricky — I know I often avoid sites because of interstitial advertising, pop-ups, etc. Whitelisting sounds like a good way to reward sites that try to keep it subtle; offloading and generalizing the task of categorizing ads into annoying or acceptable gives sites and advertisers a good threshold to duck beneath. Next step I'd like to see: a sliding scale, so browsers can be set to zero, or eleven, for tolerable annoyance. Update: 12/13 14:54 GMT by T : My fault: I liked the story so much that I missed it the first time.
Dup! (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a deja vu feeling, and it is not an ad.
Re:Dup! (Score:4, Insightful)
Doublespeak (Score:5, Insightful)
In all seriousness though, who thought this was a good idea? We use adblock to block advertisements. I do not want the developers deciding for me which advertisements will not be blocks; the only person who should control the whitelist is me.
Re:They got paid for this... (Score:5, Insightful)
I only block ads because the majority are intrusive and many sites are over saturated. If ads were all friendly I wouldn't block any of them. I think many (most?) people probably feel the same way.
Privacy is key, but doesn't seem respected here (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not 100% anti-advertising, but the privacy issue is deeper than just being on a "Do not track" list.
If the ad is served from a host controlled by the advertiser, then they have my IP address, the date and time, the number of times I saw the ad, and (by the "referer" header) what page(s) I was viewing when I saw the ad.
For me, "acceptable" ads are those served by servers which I've opted into correspond with, either by typing into the address bar or by clicking a link.
Re:They got paid for this... (Score:4, Insightful)
I am a power user, and I actually don’t mind ads. I HATE pop-up ads, though. The ones that show in the middle of the screen while you are reading, the ones that do crazy stuff when you accidentally roll over them, and every single flash based ad. But plain image banner ads, PNGs or GIFs, I don’t mind. Heck sometimes I like them. In some sites they let me know of products I care for (like upcoming games.)
I currently manually manage ad block in Firefox to allow certain sites to show their ads because I know the sites in question don't allow obtrusive stuff.
That being said: they stated that they can’t automatically determine what is an obtrusive ad so they are instead going for a kind of partnership program where they won’t block ads from specific sources that agreed to their terms. That is garbage. If you ever dealt with an ad agency you should know they WILL push as hard as they can and they will slowly violate the agreement terms and annoy users like most already do.
Re:This is a duplicate. (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a difference between protesting against certain odious forms of advertising and simply stealing content.
It's not 'stealing content' to determine what I do and do not wish to download or execute on my computer. I simply do not feel I can trust any advertisers to not be obtrusive, potential insecurity vectors, or abuse my privacy.
"ads power the web". too bad... (Score:3, Insightful)
I've seen people express that opinion and it's nonsense. Remember the internet before the first banner ad, before the web even? It was as *awesome* resource in the 1980's. It hadn't been corrupted by money and commercial interests. There was no astroturfing, you could believe reviews were a real person's opinion about 100% of the time. There were excellent resources to answer questions about a huge range of things without the $$$ sites offering to sell you shit you didn't need infesting everything. Your every move was not tracked and used to sell you shit.
So if we kill internet ads entirely, and all this crap disappears from the net? That's no loss. That's a gain. Let it all die, I say. Yes, this site too, if that's what it means: usenet of yore before the commercial spammers ruined that too had FAR better tech discussions than slashdot. Maybe the net can go back to what it was before TBL invented the web to make it usable by idiots, attracting legions of idiots, marketeers, censors, and mouth-breathing people clicking on ads to infest it.
The straw that broke the camels back (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't bother for a long time, partially because I use a lot of different browsers for different needs and that meant that I needed to setup and ad-filtering proxy which is a tiny amount of work and I am very very lazy.
But ads got so annoying over time that I just installed it, made it the default on my home network (all HTTP traffic is filtered) and not just am I not annoyed anymore by ads, the speed has gone up.
Ads take just to much time. It doesn't matter where they are. Trying to read an American magazine is a game of "hunt the article". It used to be article - ad - article. Now the article between several ad pages, often only part of the page and spread all over the magazine to force you to keep hunting for it and be exposed to more ads. TV? 5 minutes of ads for every 10 minutes of TV? Including ads for the program you just interrupted?
That leads me to the next thing about ads. They are so goddamn fucking stupid. A tiny handful are funny but they are shown maybe a handful of times. The ads that are in every single commercial block are the ones that make your brain want to crawl out of your ears. I don't watch TV anymore, not because I am not in the mood for mindless drivel but because even my desire for mindless drivel is insulted when the ads come on.
Ad-block can start to let ads through but lets face it, they do this for money and so, the ad that pays the most is the one that gets through. That is how all this kinda stuff works. Movie TV channels advertise with not showing ads, and then charge a premium for special offer blocks. You buy a DVD not to see ads and then they put non-skippable ads in front of the content.
It is not like there are no alternatives to ad-block.
If advertisers want to get back on my browser they need to sanitize their own industry. Get rid of all the animated ads, the ads that are slow or stupid or annoying and make them be delivered at insanely high speeds so that NEVER EVER a webpage refuses to load because of a slow ad server.
But that won't never happen and so, I got several block lists. Opera has the most userfriendly at the moment, can even be used to content on the site itself.
I have even gone to the trouble of filtering out comments on sites with drivel comments. It is easy, just write a javascript command to hide blocks with author "smallfurrycreature" and the net will be a cleaner place.
Yes, this is drivel, but at least it isn't drivel tracking your every move or taking ages to load.