Adblock Plus Maker Proposes Change To Help Sites 615
Dotnaught writes "Wladimir Palant, maker of the Firefox extension Adblock Plus, on Monday proposed a change in his software that would allow publishers, with the consent of Adblock Plus users, to prevent their ads from being blocked. Palant suggested altering his software to recognize a specific meta tag as a signal to bring up an in-line dialog box noting the site publisher's desire to prevent ad blocking. The user would then have to choose to respect that wish or not."
annoying prompts, on all sites soon (Score:5, Insightful)
I expect to see this meta tags on most sites in the near future.
Re:annoying prompts, on all sites soon (Score:5, Informative)
Except that, if you read the proposal, you'll notice this section:
Adblock Plus will then check the browsing history to see whether the user frequents this site (this could be specified for example as âoevisited the site on three days of the last weekâ) and then display a notification
So you'd only get annoyed once on the sites you revisit.
So why bother with the meta tag at all? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's pretty safe to assume that if a site has ads, they want you to see the ads. Every ad provider that knows about the tag will require its use on every site that uses their ads. They might as well just make it a one-time option to enable ads on sites you visit frequently.
Also, if people really care about encouraging "acceptable" ads, they should create a new subscription list that only bans the obnoxious ones. Then maybe you could use the strict list on one-off visits and the "acceptable" list for sites you visit regularly.
Re:So why bother with the meta tag at all? (Score:4, Interesting)
Want me to see ads? Bloody well host and screen them then. I use adblock because I'm sick and tired of waiting for some adtech.de server when loading a page. Also lately quite a few viruses has been spreading through ads.
One site I frequent, thedailywtf.com is hosting their ads themselves and are thus not blocked by my ad filter.
Re:So why bother with the meta tag at all? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or just split the ad list into categories...
I don't mind text ads, and static graphical banners i can tolerate..
On the other hand i don't like flash ads, and absolutely detest ads with sound (they interfere with whatever else i might be listening to), any kind of popups are also incredibly annoying. I especially hate the flash ad that plays a repeating buzzing sound, the ad got refreshed into a tab i hadn't looked at for a while, it took me a while to work out where the noise was coming from where i promptly closed that tab and filtered access to the site which served the banner.
Graphical banners meant to look like a windows dialog box (which looks stupid anyway when your browsing on a mac) but where the dialog is moving are also extremely annoying.
And as someone else pointed out, ads hosted on external servers which are slow, where the site has finished loading except for the ads and it won't display any content until the ads have loaded...
Re:annoying prompts, on all sites soon (Score:5, Insightful)
Call you paranoid? Gladly. By "something else", you of course mean the "browser history", if you read what you responded to. If you don't like that your "surfing habits" are being "tracked" then turn off the browser history. ABP wouldn't be "tracking" your habits, it'd simply be looking at the "tracking" data stored on your computer by your browser and doing some simple addition.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> I expect to see this meta tags on most sites in the near future.
Duh. How many ad networks would continue to do business with a site that lacked that tag if it ever got popular enough to have a measurable impact on ad impressions? Exactly. Thus this is pointless. People really should THINK before putting their mouth in gear. Guy wants to make everybody happy, which is a good intent, but it can't be done. The tension between ads and people not wanting to see the crap can't be solved by any means an
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
User consent, eh (Score:5, Insightful)
We need a tag for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We need a tag for this? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, maybe there's someone with a shotgun standing behind his chair requiring him to put the ads there. This way, he'll still put the ad in, but people won't have to see it if they've downloaded a Firefox plugin. Unless, of course, the guy with the shotgun knows about the tag too. Then we'll need another newer tag.
Re:We need a tag for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine it can be so assumed. And can it not also be assumed by virtue of Adblock Plus being loaded into a browser that the owner does not intend to grant that wish?
I don't see the point of this at all. Adblock Plus asks me if I want it to display ads? Well... no. No I don't. That's why I installed Adblock Plus in the first place. The clue's in the name. My answer will be no, every single time. If it was ever going to be yes, I would have whitelisted the site myself already.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this is a push for people that don't understand you can whitelist sites. I suggest Adblock Plus to a lot of my friends, some of which aren't the most computer literate people. I can understand the need behind this feature.
But I also understand bribery.
Re:We need a tag for this? (Score:4, Funny)
That sounds like a fair goal. However, may I suggest Wladimir creates a new extension, say, AdBlock Minus, that will help those people who kind of do not want, but you know, just may sometime, but don't know how to do it.
-dZ.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How nice to be so binary, but for many of us the situation is not so clear-cut. I do not want to be shown animated ads at all: their usefulness to me is outweighed by their intrusiveness. But I'm perfectly happy for a site to include text links, because they may be relevant, and will help keep this website, which I have found useful enough to visit, operational.
Currently there is no way for me to express this preference. I have to block everything or nothing.
If I wanted to see ads... (Score:5, Insightful)
Next, we are going to see a new feature to our javascript blocker that asks us if we are sure we want to block access to javascript for a given site, "cause they really, really want it!"
Re:If I wanted to see ads... (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. Now that I've blocked all the ads, I'm not exactly going to be all "Oh hey, now that I have a nice fast web-browsing experience, I need to slow that the hell down again with advertising. After all, if I want a product, clicking on ads is SURELY my first line of thought as opposed to say... searching specifically for it via google or whatever, and researching the best method by which to obtain said product".
Yeah, I can't forsee even the slightest number of ads being actively re-accepted with this. If it's blocked, it's blocked for a reason. It'll just create more slowdown when loading webpages, since now instead of loading nothing in those spots, it'll have to load their little menu asking if you want to view the ad.
Re:If I wanted to see ads... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I wanted to see ads... I wouldn't block them. This feature seems redundant.
A fair point; and one that many comments seem to bring up.
The blog post, however, explains the rationale. In particular, adblock was intended to be a mechanism to 'restore balance' in online advertising. Not to necessarily block ALL ads, but to give users the power to block excessively annoying ads, so that webmasters would tone back ads to an acceptable level (for fear of users blocking them entirely).
In practice the way AdBlock currently works, it's just so easy to block everything and forget about it. Users then forget to ever "unblock" pages that they like and would like to support (through advertising).
Now, if you're a user committed to never seeing any ads at all, then yes this feature is useless for you. You will no doubt turn it off. (Yes, the intent is for an option to be present to never show these little warnings.) But for those of us who do want to support some sites, the reminder will help us make that decision.
Of course it is entirely possible that webmasters will abuse this meta-tag as much as they abuse the ads themselves. (Why wouldn't a webmaster turn the tag on all the time?) Since the default will still be to block ads until the user says otherwise, at worst this will mean a little bar shows up in the browser the first time they visit a site. Not a huge deal. (And if it annoys you, then you just turn off the behavior.) I like the idea of being able to preview how annoying ads are for a site, and then deciding whether or not to let them through. (As long as the default start-state is "block" then I won't be inundated with crap...) I, for one, want to be able to support sites that are smart enough to have reasonable ads. (Yes, I currently manually unblock sites using the AdBlock context menu... but this would make it easier.)
Although I like this proposal, I don't understand why it wouldn't be simpler to just have someone do the sorting for those "ad-server lists". What I want is a block-list that blocks the annoying ads (e.g. flash ads that cover the page) but doesn't block un-annoying ads (e.g. demure text-ads). A whole spectrum of lists, depending on people's tastes, could be constructed. Do these kind of "nice blocking" lists already exist?
Re:If I wanted to see ads... (Score:5, Interesting)
Unsafe Ads! (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps the advertisers should be going after the reason most people are blocking ads these days.
Re:If I wanted to see ads... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm happy to view, and sometimes click on, a few reasonably inoffensive ads per site. Where I get annoyed is when they're unfriendly to readers. Either they plaster the site so densely that the real content is taking up an unreasonably small proportion of the screen; or they try to slip in ads where you'll accidentally click on them thinking they were navigation elements; or they have obnoxious animated graphics, video, or sound.
I've personally made some effort to resist just throwing in the towel and blocking everything, because I really want to punish specifically the annoying purveyors of ads, not everyone with ad-supported content. For a few years I managed it just by refusing to visit sites with annoying ads; I can do without cnn.com, and can visit news.bbc.co.uk instead (better news, too). But it's gotten progressively worse, so I recently installed AdBlock, but without a default filterset; I add rules for particularly egregious ads as I encounter them. This is tedious, though.
I personally would welcome some easier way to say that I'm okay with a few text ads in the sidebar, but I'm going to block anything that goes beyond that. I don't think this particular proposal is the solution, though--- nothing prevents site owners here from asking for an exemption even though they do have egregiously annoying ads.
Extortion racket (Score:5, Insightful)
Wanna pay me some protection money? Just a buck a week will keep you safe. If you don't pay it, I'll break your legs.
This is just like the time the phone company got you to pay to have your number unlisted. Then they turned around and sold their unlisted numbers to people. Then they came to you to sell you caller ID, so you could screen your calls. Then they started charging telemarketers money to have their caller ID's blocked from displaying.
Fuck them.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wanna keep me looking at your ads? Just a buck a week will do. Here's my PayPal account...
Fine with me, as long as it's an option (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm fine with that, as long as there's a setting to control whether or not to honor the flag. I want the option of saying "No, if I want ads to not be blocked I'll add an exception for that site myself so don't bother bringing up the dialog.". I note that there's already an option to disable ad blocking for the page or the whole site in the right-click menu of ABP's icon, so an easy way to add an exception's already in place.
Re:Fine with me, as long as it's an option (Score:5, Funny)
"I'm fine with that, as long as there's a setting to control whether or not to honor the flag."
If you don't honor that flag, you night as well be burnin' it, and mister, that's just unamerican.
How many adwriters fought and died for that flag? Who will tell the sons and daughters of this great nation the heroic stories of our pop-up heritage? Will the anthems still ring across the wiggling fields of flash and the home of the blink? WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA, SIR?
advertisers die bloody (Score:5, Funny)
How many adwriters fought and died for that flag?
Not enough. Not nearly enough.
Re:Fine with me, as long as it's an option (Score:5, Informative)
Hardly. If you read the proposal, you'll notice that even when the flag's present ABP will not present ads by default. And it won't even immediately prompt you, let alone prompt you every time. It first checks whether you visit the site often. If it sees repeated visits recently, then it brings up a bar at the bottom giving you three options: "Let me see how the site looks with ads.", "Keep blocking the ads and don't ask me about this site ever again." and "Keep blocking the ads, but ask me about it next time it qualifies.". If you choose to see how it looks, then you get the site with ads and two options: "Add an exception for this site." and "Keep blocking ads for this site.". So ABP's never, even with the tag, going to allow ads through by default. And with the repeat-visitor logic, it shouldn't even be popping up the question bar too often (unless you keep using the "Ask me later." option).
I'd prefer it to unblock by service (eg. let me tell it "Allow Google AdSense text-only ads through regardless of site."), but as it stands the proposal is hardly a neutering of ABP in any way.
Another extension (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe there should be an extension that blocks extensions from being automatically updated just because it's listed with others to be updated. That should solve the updated with new "features" problem.
Re:Another extension (Score:4, Informative)
You already have the option to uncheck each extension when the list of "these extension updates are available" appears.
Let him do it (Score:5, Funny)
And just install "NagBlock Plus".
Umm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus doesn't this effectively break some ad companies EULAs? Because I know a lot of them forbid you from enticing users to click the ads by saying "Please click the ads" or something.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, there's a number of advertising... schemes? Structures. Let's go with that. There's advertising structures that pay for "eyeballs" or "impressions." They don't promise click-throughs, they just want the ad displayed to X# of visitors. They usually get bonuses on click-throughs though.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> don't most ad companies only pay the site whenever a user clicks on an ad?
It varies. But they almost always have to pay when you do click. So if you see an ad you hate, click on it and don't buy. Do your small part to lower their conversion ration (purchases over clicks) and their business case for paying money to waste your browser screen space will be reduced.
If just a few million people would spend just 10-20 clicks a day making crappy internet advertising unprofitable, it would decline a lot.
Time for a fork (Score:5, Insightful)
Time for a fork. If he's serious about this, Wladimir Palant should /not/ be allowed to control this project. The whole /point/ of Adblock Plus, is to, y'know, BLOCK ADS.
Seriously. He's already being courted by advertizers like this, and is apparantly willing to work with them - he can't be trusted. Who's to say they won't convince him to sneak in some code that 'accidentally' fails to block a certain set of ads?
Take it out of Wladimir Palant's control, and we'll all be better off.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone said above: if you wish to block all ads forever, then you might consider a fork of ABP. However, the extension was originally started to put the balance of power between webmasters and users back in the middle, and to encourage advertisers to use less annoying ads that users would be less likely to block.
IMO, this would be along the lines of the reasoning that led him to start the extension in the first place.
Re:Time for a fork (Score:5, Informative)
Time for a fork. If he's serious about this, Wladimir Palant should /not/ be allowed to control this project. The whole /point/ of Adblock Plus, is to, y'know, BLOCK ADS.
Seriously. He's already being courted by advertizers like this, and is apparantly willing to work with them - he can't be trusted.
Take a breather there, buddy. I don't know why the /. overlords FAILed to include a link to the adblockplus page relevant to the discussion, but here it is: http://adblockplus.org/blog/an-approach-to-fair-ad-blocking [adblockplus.org]
Then, the part of that page that covers your fears: The user should have the final decision. If we allow webmasters to specify which ads the user should view or whether users with Adblock Plus should be allowed to visit their sites, they will try to maximize their profits â" and very soon users will be confronted with intrusive ads everywhere or locked out of all sites. At which point somebody will fork Adblock Plus to âoemake it work againâ and we are back at square one.
And finally, a reminder to the /. people that their fucking unicode parser is broken.
I'd only agree to view ads if (Score:5, Insightful)
...they had no Flash, no animated GIF, or any other obnoxious animations to attract attention to themselves. I wouldn't block ads as a matter of course if I could be sure they all stuck to my "nothing moving" requirement. And it only takes one offender to ruin things. If Palant carries through with his unblock idea, I hope he imposes similar requirements on sites and ads wishing to be unblocked. Otherwise, I hope someone forks Adblock Plus and does away with the unblock free pass.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll agree with all your requirements and add this: No ads served by advertising companies. I have no desire to allow companies like Doubleclick or Yahoo to track my movements across the web.
If a site hosts their own ads and they don't blink or move, then I will consider turning ads on on their site.
Also, the ad should be text or a simple image, no scripts. unnecessary scripts slow the browser down too much
Also (Score:5, Interesting)
In other (related) news, Slashdot today allowed me to disable all the ads on the site, simply for occasionally moderating an not posting stupid crap all the time. I was using adblock anyway but this removes the blank space and allows the content to expand into the areas the ads used to occupy.
Thank you Slashdot.
Re:Also (Score:4, Interesting)
I've the option of blocking ads on Slashdot offered to me as well but I choose to keep it enabled.
Re:Also (Score:4, Informative)
What blank space? Just to test, I went back to the front page, found that I had the same option available, and clicked it. Then refreshed to see what changed. Result? Nothing. The layout is identical, both before and after. ABP was tidying away any blank space just fine.
Re:Also (Score:5, Informative)
You don't even have to moderate; I'm marked unwilling. I suspect that the metric has to do either with achievement points or with the number of positive comments. (I have moderated in the past, but that was a long time ago; if there are any applicable achievements, they aren't retroactive.)
Re:Also (Score:5, Insightful)
I noticed that, too. I left the ads enabled. Slashdot is one of the few sites where I feel like it's worth supporting, and also where I occasionally see something interesting in the ads. Not that I like ads, but if anything, the fact that they're valuing my contributions enough to offer me the ability to block the ads makes me want to support them more. Weird, huh?
And no, I'm not a plant.
Re:Also (Score:5, Interesting)
I had the same reaction. I'm much less likely to turn off or block the advertising since they're so nice about it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What really surprised me was that I saw the options to block ads, and I thought to myself, "Slashdot has provided me with much thoughtful discussion for years. Meh, I'll leave the ads. Hell, even I click on some random thinkgeek advertisement every blue moon."
"WTF? I just decided to KEEP ads? WTF is wrong with me?!?"
And now as I'm typing this I'm thinking I STILL have left the ads here. And all I gotta do is check a damn box! >.<
Text vs. Graphic Ads (Score:4, Insightful)
What I do mind, is Graphic Ads that disrupt the layout of the page, or the flow as I am scrolling to read. Completely unacceptable.
I would be willing to allow select pages to display text ads that are carefully placed to minimize interference if I only want the content while at the same time providing helpful suggestions when I might want them. Is that too much to ask? I think it might be...
Ad Blocker Block... Ad Blocker Blocker Blocker (Score:5, Insightful)
Might work but I doubt it (Score:4, Interesting)
If they implement it like flash block so that the ad is replaced with a button to click to show the ad then I might consider turning the option on. If it pops up a dialog every time it blocks an ad then it goes in the bin!
Oh yeah, it will only show this pop up requesting the ad be displayed when there is a special meta-tag. I wonder how many seconds it will take for every ad service to include that tag.
I suspect that Adblock and NoScript... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I suspect that Adblock and NoScript... (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, but here's the thing: No one has the right to make money using a bad business model. We're seeing that with newspapers, so why should other Web sites be immune?
I don't know about you, but I pay for my Internet access, and I rather like the idea of controlling what gets downloaded onto my computer and what doesn't.
And why not propose a change to help Users? (Score:5, Funny)
Why not sending first a Pop-Up on the publisher's computer to ask whether he is certain he wants to advertise?!?
How about a way to download but not display ads? (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to not-mind ads... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't block non-annoying ads. (Score:4, Insightful)
I know some of you would say that any ads are annoying, but I would be willing to load and view reasonably sized banner/side ads that were:
- not animated
- didn't popup or popunder in any way
- didn't play sounds
I'd subscribe to an adblock plus list set which didn't block sites which would play by those rules. Every time I decide to play nice and view ads to show support I get hit (within 24 hours) with one that's so annoying I give it up.
Of course I also think this will never happen, so it's a bit of an empty promise - as soon as I got hit with an ad that violated those rules I'd instantly go back to the nuke it from orbit list.
Build a Personal List (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I start with an empty list. If an ad annoys or offends me, then I add the ad-server's entire domain to my list of blocked sites. My list of blocks is around 30 long accumulated over ~2 years. It doesn't take much to eliminate the really bad ones out there.
It's perfect tit-for-tat. Evil ads get punished. Good ads get rewarded. (Then again maybe I only surf sites that use good ads, it's hard to tell.)
wrong type of choice (Score:5, Insightful)
They're talking about the wrong type of choice. I'm not interested in choosing whether to allow all ads on foo.com or block all ads on foo.com. First off, it would be a pain, because every time I hit some new web site, I'd have to make this choice. In many cases, this would be my first and last visit to the site: it's just a google hit, and it turns out it's not relevant to me. Why do I want to add extra effort to this quick, pointless visit to foo.com? And even if it was a site I thought I might be coming back to, how would I make an informed decision? I'm not yet familiar enough with the site to know whether their ads are annoying or not. I don't know if their ads are animated or static; I don't know if they load flash; I don't know if they lock up my cpu with heavy javascript.
What I want is a way to control the type of ad that's shown. I don't mind text-based ads. I just don't want ads with graphics, flash, or javascript (beyond the basic javascript that's required in order to load a text-based adsense ad).
The sites that think this is a good idea also need to do a reality check. The reason I use adblock plus is that I don't click on internet ads. I never have, and I never will. If, as TFA says, 5% of internet users use adblock plus, and if most of us never would click on an ad even if we selectively turned off filtering, then what is the point of showing us ads? The number of impressions would go up by 5%, but the number of click-throughs would go down by 5%. Advertisers would see that click-through rates were down 5%, so they would be willing to pay 5% less for ads. So sites that ran ads would get exactly the same revenue, and all they'd gain would be the happy knowledge that they were annoying 5% of their users and making them more likely to stop visiting.
I've always wondered (Score:5, Interesting)
Why haven't ad providers tried to go to war with adblock? The rules in the main ABP filterset are generally pretty simple, like ad1.* ad2.* etc.
Why not acquire random domains and dynamically create links to the ads on these servers? I could see ABP blocking the first japi1fas6df.com/273849.gif, but not the 1000th. Is there a technical reason why this would be infeasible?
Re:I've always wondered (Score:4, Informative)
Because if they serve ads from
japi1fas6df.com/273849.gif
nqd92ngfg2i8.net/329518.gif
wndgizn24b0.org/834120.gif
...
they won't be able to track your behavior - your cookies don't transfer from one domain to the other.
The whole point of ABP is to NOT see ads (Score:3, Interesting)
I use AdBlock Plus.
I don't subscribe to any filters list as I create my own one-by-one.
I don't block ads served up by the local site.
I do block 3rd-party ads.
My statistics show that I can block more than 50% of all ads with just 3 filters:
*doubleclick*
*adserver*
pagead*.googlesyndication.com/pagead/*
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems stupid.
noting the site publisher's desire to prevent ad blocking
If the publisher desired their ads not to be seen, they wouldn't have put them on the site.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Mods, he may not be offtopic.
SigBlocking is not the cure for $600 promos.
Depends on how good his comment is,
Everyone mods it up.
Later, it goes to +5...
Like that's the seal of approval.
It's related to the Captcha problem.
No software can strip the ads out of this post.
Text is Static - there is no LetterItemVeto.
Embedding may be the bane of the future.
Like the caps, my friend?
Re:Hmm...Adblock Plus dialog answerer plugin? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmm...Adblock Plus dialog answerer plugin? (Score:5, Interesting)
It could be worse. They could make it a subscription service for webmasters to participate in this or something like this.
That would definitely cross some moral, if not legal line.
Re:Hmm...Adblock Plus dialog answerer plugin? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it did anything remotely annoying someone would immediately fork the code to make it quit doing that. Adblock as a product would then cease to exist and the forked code would take over. Ain't the internet and open source great?
Re:Hmm...Adblock Plus dialog answerer plugin? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember the original Adblock? Me neither.
100% of the value in ABP is the fact that it blocks ads. As soon as that changes, I and everyone else who cares to will switch to ABPP, which I guarantee you will show up within a day or two.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm entirely with the OP on this.
I'll add that I would be more compelled by Internet ads if 99.99999% of them weren't worthless, annoying crap. It's the same problem I have with many television ads: Does anyone truly believe they will gain my business by attempting to insult my intelligence?
Things that blink and wiggle around when I'm trying to read. Some goddamn dancing peacock built in flash with a feather for every state urging me to take out a mortgage. Flash ads that talk! Stuff that tries really hard to look like Windows error boxes! Shit that pops up as an overlay on top of the page I'm trying to read, and obfuscates the way to make it go away! Some goddamned double underlined thing that pops up a big gaudy box that's nearly impossible to close because I had the audacity to move my mouse over the wrong word in a pararaph! Some thing that stalls a page loading for a minute and a half because it's got a thirty megabyte FLV embedded in it!
It's not bad enough that nobody pushing banner ads seems to sell anything I want. Apparently every advertiser on the face of the planet has also taken it upon himself to personally irritate, insult, annoy, obstruct, or attempt to cajole me through threats and lies ("Your system is insecure, click here to install our tool!" "492 malware threats found!" "Hide your porn history from prying eyes!"). Modern banner ads are the new spam, and it's only fitting that they be universally blocked until advertisers can find a way to be more compelling and a lot less obstructive.
Other than the odd impulse purchase from J-List or ThinkGeek or something, who seriously buys anything they see in a banner ad? Almost nobody, that's who. Search engines are the backbone of everyone's browsing experience nowadays, so if you're selling something on the web and somebody wants to buy it they're assured to find you long before you find them via stupid banner ads. And, you know, potentially turn them to one of your competitors instead because you insist on making your ads fucking annoying.
Client-side opt-in site-support (Score:5, Interesting)
A button in Adblock would be cool to show seldom in one corner of the website to say "Support this site".
Then it would download the ads but not show them (or optionally show them [or optionally click them]). Your favorite sites would get more income. My browser knows what sites I've been to often, no extra tag necessary.
As far as I know, most people don't use ad-blocking, so the ad companies won't get weird ideas to circumvent that.
Re:Client-side opt-in site-support (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I know, most people don't use ad-blocking, so the ad companies won't get weird ideas to circumvent that.
This is an important point. Unless I'm mistaken, the vast majority of web users don't use ad-blockers. Heck, over 80% still use IE. So what exactly is the problem? These webmasters are wasting a lot of energy complaining about a small minority of users who block ads (and, we can infer from that action, that they're not the type of people easily swayed by advertising anyway). It would be more productive for them to find other ways to gain revenue, such as by having better products, finding ways to lure more people to the site, etc.
Re:Client-side opt-in site-support (Score:4, Insightful)
That's exactly correct -- Adblocking is a problem only if you are trying to sell ThinkGeek t-shirts or goatporn to Linux nerds.
But for the vast majority of sites have a bread-n-butter business model that isn't really affected by ad-blockers. Even Slashdot supports itself by selling HP servers and Novell stuff to IT types that are just checking the tech headlines.
The only thing that might make me think adblockers are not a tiny minority of users is the fact that Firefox was promoting ABP on their homepage.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
NoScript's AdBlock-blocking trick [neowin.net] was kinda dirty, but I don't see them as being hypocritical for allowing their own ads given the tremendous service(which increases safety while speeding up browsing) they provide for free.
Riiiiight. Because when it's other site's ad income you're negating it's about ideals and the rights of the users. But when it's your site's income it's because your service on your web site is automatically so much more beneficial than Google or Slashdot.
... you defend NoScript after attacking AdBlock for a lesser crime (merely asking you if you would consider viewing ads after visiting a site many times). What exactly is your angle? I think we may have the first case of Firefox extension fanboism on our hands here, folks.
Your position is interesting
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much it.
Personally I don't mind ads on sites if they are non-intrusive (those floating ads ARE intrusive). As someone who has run sites in the past for gaming clans/guilds/etc I can assure you that the meager revenue generated by hosting ads does help, and even if it's on a larger corporate scale it's the site's right to show the ads.
Think about it like this - just as you have a right to block the ads, the site has a right to block your access if you block their ads. No, I do not particularly like advertising, but it's there for a purpose.
If you don't believe the site should be generating revenue, or that the ads are too intrusive, then don't go there... I don't go to Wired anymore for both of these reasons
Porn ads (Score:5, Funny)
Personally I don't mind ads on sites if they are non-intrusive
As long as advertisements provide free porn samples I don't mind looking at ads. I hope there is a tag that can be used to white list porn ads. Even if they are selling something like Charmin toilet paper, or even paint remover, I will watch the ad as long as there are naked woman in it.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
They may have the right to show ads, as you say. But they have absolutely no right to demand that I view them.
As for Wired, well their site is a horrible, confusing mess even without their ads.
The hell they don't. You're visiting their web site hosted on their hardware, at their expense, and maintained with their time/money. If they turn around and say "Unblock or stop accessing", then that's perfectly within their "rights". And it's perfectly within /your/ rights to stop using the site in protest.
What's wrong with text ads? (Score:5, Interesting)
Adverts don't have to be flashing, bouncing, animated AVIs with extra-embedded javascript.
There's a few sites I visit which have adverts done with this thing called 'text'. I can see them, which must mean that adblock isn't blocking them.
PS: Adblock is a tiny percentage of Internet users and they're all rabid anti-advert types so any revenue being 'lost' is just background noise.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't HAVE to use a browser at all to view their site. You could use wget piped to less and 'render' it in your mind's eye. Alternatively, you could use a simple (or complicated!) algorithm to render the parts that you were m
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, that's horseshit.
They do have both the technical and legal ability to do so. You agree to their terms the moment you access the site. If you don't like the terms, you are free to browse elsewhere.
There's a gaming site here in Australia (PALGN) that at one stage detected if you were blocking ads and asked nicely for you not to (they linked to an article they'd written on running costs, etc for the site). It was quite reasonable, they didn't force anyone to view their ads, but they could, and it would be 100% legal.
Just like it's 100% legal to block certain countries, IP ranges, etc from your site, it's 100% legal to block people who are blocking ads. It's your site, you have the right to refuse entry.
Just because you "think" something is true doesn't mean it is. Maybe check your facts before posting.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
They certainly can try, but ultimately there is no way a webmaster can "detect" if his advert was displayed properly, short of looking over the end-user's shoulder.
In the USA it's perfectly legal under copyright law for browsers to alter the display to remove ads. If webmaster wants to replace his homepage with a TOS contract, that's another story.
(Also it is hilarious that you "think" something is a "fact" based on one site who detected one ad-block method, and decided to be an asshat about it. Typical nerd spazoid reaction, I guess.)
Point being, most webmasters know adblocking is just a fact of life and they've learned to live with it. If Taco tried to stop adblockers from accessing Slashdot, most people would end up having a nice laugh at his expense.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose you could combine the ideas behind display ads and CAPTCHA -- "To navigate to the next page, please select what color the shirt in the HBO ad above is."
Shit, maybe I should patent that.
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
How the fuck did this get an "interesting" mod?
Yes, of course it is. You can do WTF ever you want to copyrighted works, you just can't (necessarily) distribute the original work and/or its derivatives.
If I hated Coca Cola but loved a song that referenced it, I could clip that part out and only listen to my version--I just couldn't (under most licensing schemes) give the Coke-free version to anyone else. I could even write a program that cut that part out for other people, taking an MP3 or wav file or whatever as input, and distribute the program.
I hope the person who modded that insightful gets bitchslapped by a meta-mod.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As for NoScript's meddling with AdBlock, my personal belief is that is okay as long as the meddling involves only the showing of NoScript's as since I am using NoScript for free. I wouldn't mind if AdBlock meddled with NoScript to show AdBlock's, and only AdBlock's, own ads.
I think the GP's main point was that you say it's alright for noscript to force their ads upon you as you use their software for free but it's not fine for other content publishers to force their ads upon you. So what gives noscript the right to unblock their ads when, say, /. can't unblock ads as it doesn't have an invasive plugin but is also free to use and a good source of news and information? Personally I think that a site that is continually evolving and changing can demand more revenue then a plugin
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
When VALinux release a browser or a plugin that I use then I won't mind it displaying only its own ads.
Imagine MS put in ad blocking in a release of IE but it allowed ads to be shown on MS sites or through their ad network.
You don't mind because of who they are, not because of what they are doing. If you don't understand why that's wrong, I don't know what to say.
Regardless, the proposal sucks.
A good portion of ad revenue comes from non-regular visitors. People who land on the site read a page, then find an interesting ad to click off on.
Regular visitors tend to become ad blind. Giving regular visitors the option to see ads isn't a big plus for webmasters.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see them as being hypocritical for allowing their own ads given the tremendous service(which increases safety while speeding up browsing) they provide for free.
What about the tremendous service the other sites provide for free? I let sites show me advertising in exchange for giving me free content, because I think that's a better deal than having to pay for it directly. I don't use an ad blocker, and I haven't even disabled my Slashdot ads (although I could probably make the case that I've actually earned that right on this specific forum).
NoScript doesn't provide more of a service than the content-generating sites you're visiting. If someone makes their ads more obnoxious than you can tolerate, then don't go back there.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Google set up this nice search engine, then put adverts on it, and allowed others to have adverts.
Now, for every search I do there are 3-4 relevant sites, 5-6 exact copies of those same sites on a different server adding adsense advertising, and 2-3 other sites with ridiculous amounts of advertising and half-assed content.
This advertising-supported revenue model is really cluttering up the net, and I blame google 100%. Every halfwit wants a webpage with advertising on it, creating piles of redundant sites. Tech support website - there's a million of them, and they have different "guru" users, and people as the same questions on every site. Too much information, most of it wrong.
I've given up searching for error messages... half the hits are someone asking the question and no replies. Multitasking while the pages load, I usually resolve it myself before I find something relevant and/or useful.
Don't get me started on porn - seen her, seen her, yeah this is a copy of that other site, yeah these are all copyrighted images with the logos removed.
Fuck you internet, and fuck you google.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, please update your Google.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting raped in prison was kinda dirty, but I don't see it as being hypocritical given the tremendous service (protection, etc) which I was given for free.
If you really want 'no script', turn it off in Firefox. But I'm not willing to 'let it slide' because of how I've been helped in the past. Hopefully someone will rise up and write a "NoScript2" which does the same thing minus the kick in the teeth.
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
I got offered the choice of blocking slashdot ads today due to my contributions to the site. I had to think long and hard about whether to accept since I knew I was denying a site I value a source of revenue.
I have decided yes at the moment but I will probably change my mind since I have realised that the adverts never really bothered me anyway. I was always very good at ignoring adverts anyway so they made no difference to me. We live in a capitalist work and advertising is a part of that.
Re:Sounds good to me, ads pay for the web (Score:5, Interesting)
Having been on the Internet before all the businesses realized they could make a buck with it, I realize that the "free Web" was actually better for not having ads on it. Most of the sites that support themselves through advertising could disappear tomorrow, and no one would miss them; the only exception that comes to mind is Google, whose ads are non-intrusive enough that even people who don't like ads can tolerate them.
What I have to wonder is, are the AdBlock Plus folks getting kickbacks in return for this new "functionality"?
Mousover popups (Score:5, Insightful)
The latest dirty trick that's ticking me off are mouse-over popups. They buy a wide banner placement, and if you make the mistake of scrolling over them, up pops a huge screen-grabbing popup. Fortunately adblock plus takes care of the danged banners in the first place, so I haven't been getting those since I installed it.
Re:Who uses these things anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you come to the issue of how the ad placement and content messes up your website because you're not using Internet Explorer. These ads can screw up the page layout, making the user's experience with the website just out-and-out suck.
Screw advertising. (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. The only way to make this whole system fail is to refuse to enable it. The great trick of the advertisers is making you think they have some entitlement to stick themselves into your life.
You want things to change? The system must fail in order for it to change.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Two different ways to read this. (Score:5, Informative)
OK, you see that big red stop-sign icon at the top right? See the little down-arrow to the right of it? Click on that. See how it drops down a menu?
Now, see where it says 'Disable on tech.slashdot.org'? That will disable Adblock Plus on all pages served from tech.slashdot.org. Handy, eh? You can even call up that menu from the main page and then it says 'Disable on slashdot.org' so you can enable ads across the whole site!
Then, whenever you're on a site where the ads are not being blocked, the red stop-sign icon turns into a green go-sign, and the ads appear. Easy!
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cue next extension in 3... (Score:5, Informative)
According to the article, about 5% of Firefox users have adblock installed. That's a tiny percentage of Internet users and most of them wouldn't click on adverts anyway.
This puts the level of loss in the 'background noise' category. I don't think it's worth alienating adblock fans over a personal guilt trip.
Re:Cue next extension in 3... (Score:4, Interesting)
When the advertisers realize that we have legit reasons to be worried about code running on our boxes, and they do their ads securely, and they play by our rules, then I'll be happier about seeing ads on the net. But right now, any ad appearing in your browser window only means that you're probably already compromised.