DoubleClick Warns Against Ad-Blocking Browsers 1399
An anonymous reader writes "The end of free Internet content will come when Web browsers start blocking online advertisements by default, a DoubleClick executive has warned. Bennie Smith, the online advertising network's privacy chief, said the popularity of tools like Adblock -- an extension to the Mozilla Firefox browser -- which makes blocking online ads simple was tied to 'a negative vibe against advertising in general'."
cry me a river (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, free-rider situations like this are precisely where market forces don't work efficiently. Everyone reading this site while blocking ads is able to do so only because of people like me who do view them (and subscribers). And I free-ride at the expense of people who are willing to view pop-ups.
Bennie Smith is entirely correct -- if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Blocking ads won't end free content on the Web. It will lead to innovation and new opportunities.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Blocking ad's will only lead to innovation in terms of people trying to circumvent the pop-ups, and other people trying to figure ways to prevent that. In the end - it is a cat and dog chase and it is a waste of our resources. I would rather see us live in harmony (as far as internet/advertising goes) and working on creating better services.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, let's can the idealism and be a little realistic here. You're a web site publisher with little ad revenue left. What do you do? Your training is not in marketing, it's maybe in business development. Are you going to sit there and try to invent a new form of advertising that isn't patented by Google, or are you just going to say "screw it" and charge for the use of your site?
You can hope all you want that people will innovate; the reality is most web site owners are only in it for the money. They don't care about compromise and even if they did, they wouldn't know where to even start coming up with new revenue streams.
I think this is what gets lost in these discussions. You can call it short-sighted, you can call it whatever you want, but the fact is the owners of most web sites are not innovators and never claimed to be. All they want to do is put out a product and make money doing it. If they have exhausted one method, they will simply move on to the next rather than trying to come up with something entirely new. And there's not even anything wrong with this; this is the way small businesses in this country have always worked. It's not up to every guy who runs a bakery or a stationary store or whatever to come up with entirely new business models whenever they hit hard times, and nobody expects them to - yet for some reason, people do expect that when it comes to the web.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet, *somebody* in that pool *WILL* innovate, and the ones who want to continue the fight will learn from the innovation(s) and apply them.
Think of farmer's markets and other direct marketing efforts for small farmers, because either they cannot get into the commodity market or can't make money doing so. So they innovate.
Farmer's markets and other DMA efforts like CSAs (Community-Supported Agrigulture, i.e., customers "subscribe" to the farm to get periodic product from the farmers. Some veggie growers here in PDX are able to supply veggies 10-12 months out of the year. So you're not getting tomatoes and lettuce in December and winter squash and turnips instead, so it requires some flexibility on the customer as well) allow the farmers to work directly with their customers, and sell at a mutually beneficial level - farmer gets more profit, customer gets better product.
$3.00/dz for farm eggs might be too much for you. But at least I can unequivocally state what has, and more importantly, has NOT, gone into those eggs.
For everyone else, there's a WalMart Supercenter near by.
Small business owners, if they're not innovators, they are imitators. There's nothing wrong with that, unless every little small business in an area starts looking a little bit the same.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, well, if the baker starts to shout about his "special prices" into my ear every time I walk in, I'm going to wear ear plugs.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the content draws enough people, and the owner wants it to persist, it (generally) will. A free/paid mix of content can be set up. The provider can monetize in different ways, such as audience data mining, affiliate plans, or swag sales. They can set up a "tip jar". They can network with other similar sites to make a network and take advantage of numbers. They can minimize costs by taking advantage of things like mirroring or BitTorrent. They can take advantage of their community by putting out a call for mirrorers. They can offload the content to a mailing list to relax web bandwidth needs. The can open-license the content and let it prosper in fansites.
Or, there's always failure. Not all ideas are good, and not all should be treated like they are.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hope is not required -- as a web site owner, you will innovate, or you will be out of business. Just because you are "only in it for the money" does not grant you immunity from this fact. There are more than enough people in this world who will figure out more creative ways to part consumers from their money, we are not in any danger of running out of choice. Dave
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now market is ripe for someone to come up with better system of advertising. Someone will make a ton of money meeting this need. Who said anything about individual operators of sites needing to come up with new business models or advertising system?
Dont try to say that popups were necessary for internet to be what it is - if anything you'll hear the quality of sites was better before the days of popups. Popups are crude abuse of a browser feature that certainly would have been designed differently had the architects anticipated what would happen with them.
Obviously anyone would agree that internet advertising serves important purpose but it's absurd to imagine "popups" are The Way to advertise and that blocking them is somehow blocking advertising.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
I only block stuff that's obtrusive to me:
-If it moves, flashes, animates or makes noise, it's gone
-If they try a popup/popunder, it's gone
Static ads don't annoy me (much like the newspaper he was mentioning), and I don't block them.
Oh, and I also block additional ads on any sites I pay to access - if I'm already paying their subscription fee, I deserve an advertising-free environment.
N.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
I could create a free slashdot in a single day of programming: an rss feed, a thunderbird plugin, and a new Usenet group is all it would take. The only thing missing would be the users. But that's the only important thing.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:3, Insightful)
How about this:
Bandwidth (or do you think free geocities account will do it for you). Your site will be
Then there is advertising...you want your site to be known right?
Then there is maintenance. Yea you could probably whip up something similar to
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Interesting)
When advertisers started using Flash animations with SOUND, I snapped and decided to go on a quest for absolute free-loading. The only ads I am willing to tolerate are google-style text-only ads and static images.
Advertisers are going too far and I see freeloading as one way of protesting... and definitely a necessary thing for dial-ups.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Filtering the ads is my way of telling advertisers and websites that abusive ads are unwanted. Freeloading might not be right but neither is the audio-visual abuse many advertisers use.
Example 1: a flash ad with sound popping up at 04h00 when the 100Wx2 (RMS) amplifier plugged to my PC is still on. This happened to me once and I scrapped Flash to make sure it would never happen again. (Until I learned about the likes of flashblock.)
Example 2: High-contrast, high-motion/jumpy Flash or animated GIF in or around an article make reading fairly painful - until I discovered FlashBlock&co, I used to either resize the browser and scroll to hide these or move a window on top of these ads.
Both cases are absolutely unacceptable. Silent static ads, preferably text-only, are the only ones I will tolerate - they're discrete, quiet and trying to filter them would have many undesirable side-effects.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
DoubleClick's pop-up graphical banner ads are like a tanker truck that burns 100 gallons of gas to deliver 50 - inefficient.
Google's more conservative ads are cheaper to deliver and not coincidentally less often blocked.
That's doubleclick's problem - they think of the web as advertising, because that's all they do. They don't even offer a real service like google does. Maybe their bloated, annoying ads will go the way of the dinosaur. You know what? The web will survive.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether or not "the Internet" is a public good (which may or may not be the case), free web content is most certainly excludable and rival. It's excludable in that access can easily be restricted and rival in that use costs the providers money to keep access available.
Forget the jargon and use some common sense. If all Slashdot readers stop viewing ads and their ad revenue disappears, Rob will or will not keep offering free access?
Blocking ads won't end free content on the Web. It will lead to innovation and new opportunities.
Perhaps, but requiring the creation of completely new forms and models of web content hardly contradicts Smith's point, does it?
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe not this site, but certainly other sites can and do operate at a loss. I worked for a TV station a while back and I can tell you that the web site - as a single entity - NEVER made money and was always operating at a loss. The information provided on the site, however, effected some cost savings on the broadcast side of the business, though, which balanced things out. In other words, if a web site is the sole means of income, yeah, you probably need ads. but if it's a compliment to the overall business, they're not necessary.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't. I have Adblocker installed, I have it configured to display Slashdot's ads because I typicaly click on them on accident if I don't. I have doubleclick blacklisted because their ads are irritating.
In fact, no one I know blocks Google ads. They're unobtrusive, helpful, and direct me towards the products and services I'm allready looking for. Why would I block them? They're like a yellow pages for the internet.
So really, its the people that sell advertising space to herbal viagra vendors on their Disney fan site that are going to suffer, not people like Google.
Build ads that don't piss me off. I have never blocked an ad that didn't piss me off.
Re:a nitpic (Score:5, Interesting)
It depends.
I used to think that Abblock worked by just redirecting anything filtered to the bit bucket. Then, I hit a site that gave me a redirect and told me to turn off Adblock. Now, they were actually serving up the ads locally so I don't know if the same detection can work with 3rd party ads. Maybe it has to do with Adblock blocking HTTP GET for filtered content or something... I don't know. But somehow they knew that their ads were not getting rendered (received?) by my browser.
But the point is that, yes, sometimes they can tell if you are blocking.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that doubleclick.net is in trouble because they've annoyed so many people that someone else has decided to do something about it. Opening up my adblock black list, I can see that doubleclick.net is the very first entry.
What free sites need to do is find a marketing firm taht doesn't have obnoxious ads, then they'll stay in buisness, because people won't block what isn't annoying.
Case in point: Just for shits and giggles I opened up the article in IE, and what do you know there's an delightful to look at marque add promenently displayed at the top of the page (provided by doubleclick no less.)
When advertisers realise that people visit websites because of the content, not to look at ads maybe they'll place less obtrusive, non-flash ads that don't encroach on the content.
When that happens maybe I'll stop blocking ads, or maybe the damage has already been done.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Interesting)
So, let me turn off adblock, so I can watch them still wither into nothingness. I'm no longer a free-rider, they just bought something with their advertising that wasn't ever going to pay off, my eyeballs.
Some advice, I may one day buy a new car, Ford/Chevy/etc. I may not. Either way, it's totally uninfluenced by your billions of dollars a year in ad money. Keep that money, and buy something with it. More R&D, lower prices, hell, have the biggest hooker and booze party on planet earth, it matters not. This goes for people who sell laundry detergent, fast food, and video games.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:3, Interesting)
The trick is to not annoy people with the advertisements, but still get your name in people's heads.
You say that, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
You say this, but you don't truly know to what extent you've been influenced.
When McDonalds first started running adds referring to themselves as "Mickey-dees", I was galled at what a blatant and rediculous attempt it was to gain "street cred". Surely this will never work, said I.
2 months later, and millions in advertising, I start hearing people say "lets go to Mickey-Dees".
Noone in their right minds thinks that when they pop the top of a Budweiser *ugh*, buxom swimsuit models will randomly show up and start partying. But I'd be willing to bet that somewhere in anheiser busches marketing department there is a graph that shows a direct correlation between the number of buxom lasses in ads, and the ammount of money they get from the 18-25 year old market. Sorry for the off topic rant.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
2 Facts:
1) People will always want things free (As in paid for by ad's)
2) If the people who serve ads as we know it today die off, soemone else will come back and fill the void.
People do tolorate and to a certain extent, apreciate ads, but the reason why people block ads today is because the people serving ads are crap flooding people with annoying devices like pop-up that serve up lies, half truths and spyware.
The advertiser who learns the rule of doing it in moderation and not pissing off your audience is the one whose gonna make it, not scum like DoubleClick.
In essence, this whole mess is the advertising industries own fault, not the fault of the makers of ad blocking software.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:3, Insightful)
What is happening is
You are 100% correct. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh wait - I think I have that backwards - there was *better* content on the web *before* the major corperations and their ads came on.
You -> Foot -> Mouth
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:3)
To date, I haven't seen an ad blocker that can block text ads. And you'll notice more and more sites using the Google style ads every day. I could care less what DoubleClick thinks. In fact, the statistics on Adsense demonstrate that less annoying ads do in fact work. They work just as well, or (in most cases) better than flashing banner ads.
DoubleClick's ads are annoying, and detract from the value that I receive from going to the web page that hosts them. If there's no value for me view
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
This can't be emphasized enough: Doubleclick is the one at fault. Any problem they perceive with ad blocking is a direct consequence of their own actions. They are the ones that made online advertising annoying, intrusive, and invasive of privacy. They are the ones that made everyone hate internet advertising. How many of us first learned how to use
It is exactly like them to say it is our fault for not wanting to be annoyed with pop-ups, pop-unders, mouse-dodging javascript widows that pop up fifteen new windows when you manage to close them while simultaneously tracking every single site we ever visit. We all know about Google ads -- ads I've actually clicked on in order to buy product, not just a fake click to throw a website a click-through's worth of revenue. Good behavior gets rewarded. But Doubleclick thinks it is our behavior that needs to change. We should just accept whatever crap they want to foist on us, apparently. Why won't we just bend over?
And as far as "a negative vibe against advertising in general" -- he's goddamn right! Because most advertisers are just like Doubleclick. Advertising is everywhere, and designed to be as obnoxious as possible. Like with television ads, which can be severely annoying and thus causes people to hit the mute -- or record the show and then skip the ads. Just like with those bastards at Doubleclick, Television advertisers have only come up with two ideas on how to fix this:
1) Make the ads even -more- obnoxious and hard to avoid.
2) Chastise us for not wanting to be annoyed.
If you read the TFA, you'll see that he really believes he has purchased our eyeballs. No, you fool, you payed a website to put your ad on their page. I'm under no obligation to look at the thing. You might think I owe you my eyeballs, but I never agreed to be given a headache by a flashing ad that pops up when I leave that page.
Bennie is right about one thing, though: His company's behavior is going to kill internet advertising that tries to grab eyeballs through irritation. I doubt the 'free' internet will end, because Google already has shown how you can make money off advertising and not piss people off. But even if he is right and a substantial portion of the internet is incapable of adapting to a world where the people are in control of what they see, I have only one thing to say:
Good. I hope they die off as quickly as possible. I want some serious Darwin shit to go on here, and I want it to be clear that the ones that will survive are the ones that can make money without pissing me off.
Doubleclick and every advertiser like them needs to die. We will make them an evolutionary dead end. And despite all their screaming, once they are gone, buried, and slowly turning into some future generation's gas we'll find out that we never needed them at all.
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
The end of graphical ads, not free content (Score:5, Insightful)
Bennie Smith is entirely correct -- if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web.
No. It means that if ad blocking becomes standard, it will pose a threat to bouncing, popping, blinking, annoying graphical ads on the web. Text ads do not get in the way, do not distract, and do not get blocked.
The fact that Mr Smith sells bouncing, popping, flashing, annoying graphical ads may have something to do with his opinion.
Note to marketers: It is possible to reach your target audience without annoying everyone else.
Re:The end of graphical ads, not free content (Score:4, Insightful)
Despite the fact that I am technically savvy, I have not invested time in AdBlock or anything else.
I have FlashBlock (moderately misnamed, it really makes loading Flash fully voluntary), turned off image animations, and forbid unrequested popups.
By and large, this makes the web perfectly tolerable, and I do not feel that further time invested in crazy blocking schemes would pay off. The only thing on the horizon that might change the balance is further penetration of interstitials (I don't instantly leave the site, but I don't come back), or on-page adds (that aren't Flash since I block that).
If they weren't such dicks, they might not have prompted the formation of such sophisticated tech to counter them.
It isn't about 'ad blocking' per se (Score:4, Insightful)
Very few ad blocker programs block ads that are not attempting to do something abusive. It is about blocking intrusive and abusive ads. Doubleclick and ilk want huge centralized databases of personal information and push formats like audio/popup/popunder/floating ads that actively interfere with people using the web.
It is as if you were reading a magazine and everytime you turned the page someone shoved a sign between you and the magazine and wouldn't let you read until you signed something and crumpled the ad up and threw it away.
The free market is just telling marketers don't be evil. Doubleclick is unhappy because their business model is to be as evil as we want to be.
It is noticable that only marketers appear to believe that intrusive advertising (whether you are talking telesolictors, door-to-door salesmen or popups) is something people actually want.
Adblock (Score:5, Insightful)
threshhold (Score:3, Insightful)
Precisely!
I don't block:
A simple, static (per-view) banner doesn't bother me. Advertizing related to the content doesn't bother me. Pretty, but subtle, images that fit the color scheme and page layout of the site are just fine.
What I will block every time are
Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. (Score:4, Funny)
I shall build you a shrubbery if you send me a copy of these things you speak of!
Re:cry me a river (Score:4, Insightful)
Doubleclick wants to get rid of the free as in beer internet as well as the free-as-in-Mel Gibson painted blue internet. If they had their way, they would track every single person on the internet and their shopping habits, eating habits, and any other thing that they could figure out how to track, and sell it all to the highest bidder.
Fuck you double-click! If people weren't trying every single underhanded trick to make money on the Internet, the place would be better. Fuck you, fuck your adware-hocking buddies, and fuck Roland Pipsqueakalli for their desperate attempts to make a buck off of my back.
Re:cry me a river (Score:5, Insightful)
It was when these retardo-bozos began the damned flash ads that winked and blinked until they drove you nuts that I began to get angry. When the damned ads started getting up and marching across the screen like wooden soldiers in a little kid's dreams, I began to get apoplectic. Then you couldn't even click on a link without being redirected to an ad page before being permitted to see what you wanted to see.
And somewhere along the way these veritable cretinous lunatics decided that they had the right to set malicious cookies that would phone home everytime you turned on your computer thus slowing down your boot time and generally mucking up the innards of YOUR VERY OWN computer paid for with your hard earned dollars. And this character has the nerve to threaten us with the DEATH OF THE INTERNET!!! if we don't stop preventing him from annoying us.
Yes, I agree. Screw you double-boner and the rest of your silly fannies.
Re:cry me a river (Score:4, Insightful)
You're computer will not get slowed down by cookies (once again, just small text files). Certain programs such as adaware will however recognize malicious cookies as being ones that are used to track your movement on the internet. The way that this works is dozens of websites participate in allowing the tracking company (such as doubleclick) to read their own cookie each time you connect to the site. So if you went to say msn's website and they were using doubleclick's tracking cookies, they would send a request to doubleclick to check for their cookie before msn sends its page info. Doubleclick would then go "ah yes, our cookie is here.. this is user ID *some ID number*. Let us update our database which has a primary key of that number to add the information that this user has visited msn at this time today".
Cookies are not all bad, they help to keep track of state (such as shopping carts or login info) across pages.. as html was designed as a static medium.
Err.. so anyway.. Cookies didn't slow down your computer. It was probably spyware/malware from p0rn sights or Gator or some shit like that.
Re:cry me a river (Score:5, Insightful)
Doubleclick and its cronies have been indirectly stealing people's money for years. Why does the average Joe switch from dialup to cable/DSL? Because these stupid Flash ads and images keep clogging bandwidth like crazy. Now that cable/DSL has overtaken dialup, Doubleclick can make more money by placing even more obnoxious ads on pages.
Also, look at some of the ads these guys put out: "Congratulations! You have won our hourly prize! Click OK to claim it," not bothering to tell you that you will have to give plenty of personal information, which is at their disposal to sell to spammers. "Shoot the villain and win a free iPod/Xbox!" At the very bottom of this ad is white text on a light backgroud saying "With participation in our program."
Not to mention the fact that they put adware/spyware on your computer without your consent or even your knowledge. Granted, this is only a minor problem if you are a more educated user who has a spyware removal tool and runs Windows Update regularly (if you have Windows), but it's still a problem. While Doubleclick may have a right to place ads on pages, they have no right to exploit people.
On top of that, the executive's warnings are completely unfounded. IE still takes up most of the browser market, and how many average users who happen to have tried Firefox would even know that it supports extensions, much less even know that Adblock exists?
Re:cry me a river (Score:5, Insightful)
Google ads, on the other hand, I have no problem with. They are small (both in terms of content and download size - particularly important if I am using GPRS and paying per byte), unobtrusive, and - most important - relevant. I have even bought things as a direct result of Google ads, something no other advertising mechanism can claim. I have no problem with well-targetted adverts, but blanket adverts just get ignored. Whether the filtering happens in my browser or my brain makes very little difference.
[1] Open in background tab, then close without ever actually looking at the tab.
Exactly right (Score:4, Interesting)
Doubleclick is their own worst enemy. It's not just the trashy ads, but their spyware cookies and other means of tracking internet users. Here's a clue for those bastards: We're not here for your convenience. We pay for our bandwidth and that doesn't mean you're entitled to it. If your customer sites want to find a different way to make money, have at it. Another site will find a less obtrusive way to get their advertising in front of consumers by offering the same content. That's the way the free market works. They win, you lose. And it couldn't happen to a more deserving company.
AdBlock: reserving the right... (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not wish to be advertised at, so I generally refuse to use sites which require me to sign in to use non-commercial services.
I wouldn't be too sad to see the end of commercial websites funded by advertising.... the internet managed long enough before the days of spam and aggressive advertising.
I remember surfing the web with IE5 on Windows 98 and finding advretising totally unobtrusive, with just a banner ad on every page. Then in the space of about 6 months, I started seeing pop-ups, ads with sound, javascript tricks, etc
So now I block all advertising regardless of its nature. Had quite enough of that. And them.
AdBlock Filter Here! (Score:4, Informative)
Welcome to the new old internet, enjoy the peace and quiet =D.
[Adblock]
googlesyndication
us.yimg.com/a/
reklama
Re:AdBlock Filter Here! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:cry me a river (Score:5, Insightful)
Today, it's relatively easy to spot the advertising within the page to block it out. Eventually, advertising will become so integrated with the content that you can't automatically detect and strip it out.
I agree whole heartedly with blocking truly annoying forms of advertising, such as popups, but to block all advertising, including stuff that goes out of its way to not be annoying (such as Google Ad Sense) is really just shooting ourselves in the foot.
We want to encourage non-annoying advertising!
Re:cry me a river (Score:3, Insightful)
I have found google ads to be the first that are actually usefull and helpfull.
Re:cry me a river (Score:3, Insightful)
If all the advertising in the world dried up tomorrow, there would be an instant and huge opportunity for ISPs that provided good, seamless and easy P2P publishing, because whichever ISP provided it would be the one provi
In other news. (Score:5, Funny)
What a hypocracy! (Score:4, Funny)
end of free internet content (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertising is an important revenue stream, but its not the only revenue available nor the only viable business model. I don't see alot of people blocking Google advertisements since they're non-intrusive and context sensitive... only obnoxious flash based adverts, or banners -- Doubleclick's meal ticket.
FUD by a company executive to protect his business model. Nothing to see here, move along...
popup ads, not the same as newspaper ads (Score:5, Insightful)
The analogy doesn't hold up. To compare ad-blocking with something that could do the same in newspapers doesn't even make sense. What's really going on (in my opinion) is the natural selection process. Browsers started out simple, naive, and unassuming. Then came the predators... in this case popup ads. Now most browsers offer popup ad blocking or extensions to block popups.
Popup ads are nothing like newspaper advertising -- the dynamic is quite different. For example, if there were the capability and there really was a newspaper that had advertising that actually jumped up in front of what you had started reading, or some other intrusive behavior, that paper would be likely shunned by most consumers and the paper would fail.
Popup ads today are just part of the browser experience and its evolution... but, popup ads are annoying to most, and eventually will (okay, at least should) disappear... advertisers don't like paying for something consumers will never see. Meanwhile I see normal sidebar ads as being sufficient as more people use the internet... I can only speak anecdotally, but if sidebar ads are tastefully done, and well-targeted, it is not unusual for me to click and browse/shop and maybe even purchase. It's similar to the newspaper paradigm... simple, unobtrusive, universally accepted, and usually non-offensive.
I can't imagine an internet incapable of sustaining itself without popup ads... (For the record, there's a certain mortgage/lending institution from which I would never take a loan -- that's how annoying I find their popups.)
Re:popup ads, not the same as newspaper ads (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think that you quite understand the significance that AdBlock provides for FireFox functionality
Right now I'm browsing slashdot ad-free (No, i'm not a subscriber) because of this this tool. All you have to do is right click the image and block the entire domain (the server/directory serving the ad-images) and all of the ads on a site magically vanish.
This is very comprable to newspapers since the ad is inline with the content, not like popups where they're annoying and obtrusive. The fact is, AdBlock makes it possible to read a newspaper with the Ad's just completely gone, only the newspaper is the internet.
Re:popup ads, not the same as newspaper ads (Score:5, Insightful)
Out of curiosity, do you think that changing channels on the TV when a commercial comes on is immoral or stealing?
Re:popup ads, not the same as newspaper ads (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple (Score:3, Insightful)
I will block all das like that. Google did this right, and I don't block there ads.
'Ok, Slashdot editors, I want to read your magazine, but I do not want to let you earn any money for running it.'
And?
"Any other behaviour is immoral"
from dictionary.com:
immoral Audio pronunciation of "immoral" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (-môrl, -mr-)
adj.
Contrary to established moral principles.
your statement seems to be false. nobody, except you and advertisers, cons
Some truth to this for smaller sites (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, there is some truth to it.
I try to unblock ads to my favorite small sites (e.g., sourceforge, slashdot, overclockers, ocforums), especially as survival is not so guaranteed for the smaller sites. -- Paul
all ads vs. pop-up ads (Score:3, Insightful)
Geez Louise... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ad blockers are simply a way for 'net users to say "No! You already have enough places to advertise, and I don't want my computer screen to be one of them."
What part of "No!" don't advertisers understand?
Annoying ads (Score:3, Insightful)
Who says the Internet is free in the first palce? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tip (Score:5, Insightful)
In the age of dialup a simple 3KB page would have >20KB of stupid banner ads and logos.
Now we're in the age of flash popup/under/over/sideways ads that have loud "HEY BUY ME" audio samples and etc..
Yes, an ad has to be noticed. But if it's just too much of a pain in the ass people are going to actively try and ignore them.
For me it has gotten to the point where I actually mute the TV during station breaks because the commercials are not only repetitive and annoying but insulting to my [and anyone over the age of seven] intelligence.
And no, RemodelAmerica, I really don't want your fucking cheap wall siding. Stop paying for EVERY AD SPOT ON THE WEEKEND....
Tom
No sympathy at all (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no sympathy at all; you abused your customers, and now they have a "negative vibe." Deal with it.
Re:No sympathy at all (Score:4, Insightful)
Boo hoo. (Score:3, Insightful)
Google has the right idea, ads based on the content of the page, taking up just a little space, no animation to draw your attention from the real content on the page. With that method, if I want to find someone who is selling what I just read about, I know where to look!
Not all ads are bad (Score:3, Insightful)
However, there are ads that bother the hell out of me and make me want to block them or stop visiting the page that hosts them. These usually include flash banner ads (shoot the monkey, sink a basket, hit the target, etc.) or animated .gifs or anything else that's more bandwidth intensive than my 56k connection at home can handle in a few seconds. Additionally, ads about products that I don't want or ads that look like scams or phishing attempts really bug me.
It's not the ads that are bad, it's the type, placement, and content of those ads that gets to me.
Don't be underhanded. (Score:5, Insightful)
This advertising space is limited to the page I am viewing. I consider it unacceptable to:
- Show popups.
- Show popunders.
- Spam me.
- Install spyware / adware.
Basically if you advertise in any way that is not confined to the page/window I am viewing, all bets are off when it comes to blocking your advertisements.
This Newspaper, Why, It's Like Swiss Cheese! (Score:5, Funny)
"He said if a similar tool could be produced for newspapers, it would not be accepted by consumers. 'You'd go to your local corner shop and buy the daily paper, and you'd have these large holes where the ads were. You'd somehow feel like your 25 cents had not gotten full value,' he said."
What if you went to a baseball game, and there were only open space -- holes, that is -- where the billboards usually were, and your beer cup had a hole where the "Budweiser" logo goes, and the peanuts were generic (with holes in them), and there were dogs with holes in their mouth and when they bark they shoot holes at you? I say, you'd somehow feel you didn't get a good value!
'Negative vibe' goes way back (Score:3, Informative)
We have lost, almost completely, the concept of pandering as harmful. In the Divine Comedy, Dante put the panders in the sixth circle of Hell, lower (and hence worse than) than the murderers. Someday a lot of DoubleClick guys will join them...
In other news, burglars complain about police (Score:5, Funny)
"Youz all needs burglars, see?" said Gibbons in an interview from his cell. "We're keeping the economy running, you shoulds be thanking us!"
Arguing that product theft spurred economic activity by forcing consumers to purchase more, Gibbons estimates that if burglary drops by a mere 15% nationally, the effects could be felt in the form of hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs as demand for replacement products wane.
"It's like this," he said as he preened his whiskers. "Them cops, they're always sniffing around where they ain't welcome, but instead of helping the economy by buying donuts like theys do in the movies, they're out busting honest, hard working economic invigorators like myself!"
His tail whipping back and forth in a frenzy, Gibbons then launched into a tirade against the specific officers that had arrested him earlier that afternoon for cutting a stereo out of a parked car.
Finally, he closed the interview with this prediction: "If yous all don't hold in the reins on Magruff over there, industries are gonna topple! Let me and my friends free, for the sake of our country!" He then scampered to his nest at the back of the cell.
Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't to say that I don't appreciate adverts when they are clever and targetted but this is very rare compared with the huge amount of dross that hits our door mats, or spews from every screen or the pages of magazines and poster boards. TiVO, Pithhelmet/adblock and registering with the likes of the Telephone Preference Service etc do make a big difference. I am generally indifferent to advertising these days as a result except when someone really goes out of their way to get to me and that really doesn't make me particularly inclined to listen to their sales pitch.
I find it particularly funny when people say that Mozilla/Firefox/Safari/Opera etc do not render web pages properly when compared to IE and yet when I use Safari or Firefox and filter out all the ads the pages look so much better than they do when using IE so frankly I don't care. And with the move to IE7 do we really think that MS will allow anyone to have something like Pithhelmet/Adblock? Doubtful. In which case I don't think the alternative browsers have anything to worry about for some time.
So, the message for advertisers? Learn the art of subtlety and grow a brain.
Let it end the era of intrusive advertizing (Score:5, Insightful)
Then let it end. I'm fed up with the business model of running intrusive advertizing that means nothing but annoying to the viewers.
I'd pay some extra $$$ for better content and service. I know many slashdot readers (read students) are too used to getting many things for free. But that business model CAN'T work for long, as the providers of information need to make some profit somehow. Either you yield to the advertiser's demand or stand against it.
Well the choice is yours. I am to choose against annoying flashy ads and pop-ups (not that I'm getting any of these with Firefox).
Agreed... (Score:3, Insightful)
Most free content on the web is supported by advertising. The advertiser pays the website publisher to display ads on their site, in the hope that they will catch someone's eye. If enough people run ad-blocking software, this will no longer be a viable business model, and most free content on the web will need to find another method of funding.
It's the same issue with TV commercials and TiVo.
You can whine all you want about how evil and annoying the companies are, and say "So what if they're not making any money? Greedy bastards, it serves them right!". But keep in mind, they can always take their toys and go home, and where will that leave you?
Personally, I don't mind putting up with ads. I tune the majority out mentally, and I even occasionally click on an interesting one.
Agreed...??? NOT (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on, that's... (charitably) WRONG.
MOST of the content on the web is on the edge; supplied by individuals. And that's where the growth is, too.
Just look at how much BitTorrent traffic is carried.
Ratboy
Re:Agreed... (Score:3, Insightful)
But keep in mind, they can always take their toys and go home, and where will that leave you?
Playing with the better toys that never used this model, in a cleaner room.
Re:Agreed... (Score:4, Insightful)
Greedy bastards, it serves them right!
AdBlock will be GOOD for the advertising industry (Score:5, Insightful)
What am I getting at here, other than wasting time that could better be spent tweaking queries? Darwinism, selective adaptation, survival of the fittest (or at least the least obnoxious), call it what you will. But if *more* people used AdBlock, and used it selectively, advertisers would quickly learn that people go out of their way to avoid seeing things bouncing around and strobing at 15hz while trying to read the news.
And Flash-based ads... I do a lot of browsing on a laptop. A CPU intensive ad is not only demanding screen real estate, but it is directly limiting my browsing time by using an obscene amount of battery power. I feel *no* guilt at all in using Flash Click To Play to filter *all* those ads, no matter how obnoxious they are or aren't, and no matter how much I may wanna support the site they're on.
Adapt or die. Those advertisers that grep their server logs properly will improve and therefor prosper. The rest? Fuck 'em.
Integrate the advertising into the content (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want advertising that people won't block, you need to use one of two options:
1. Make it unobtrusive. I really don't mind that above the comment posting form I'm currently using I see the icons for Google and Intel. It's part of the editorial content, but it could have been an ad - as long as it wasn't animated and annoying. Of course, I consciously tune this content out, but it probably helps reinforce the relevant brands.
2. Integrate the advertising into the content. If it's part of the useful content I'm reading, then it won't be a problem for me - as long as it doesn't render the content useless. Of course, we come to the problem of editorial integrity here - but that's always a problem, because writers always have agendas.
Of course, doing #2 is genuinely hard and would make DoubleClick's business a lot less profitable. Tough for them.
Blocking ads versus not clicking on them (Score:3, Insightful)
What if I don't block them, but I conciously refuse to ever click on one? Is that any different? How about if I make a point of never buying any product I see an ad for online? How about if I just ignore ads?
How is blocking them any different?
I'm not going to get a mortgage from some online bank. I'm not going to buy a car just because I saw an ad for one. No amount of advertising will change that.
I block ads because it's convenient to do so. Were this somehow impossible, no one would get any more revenue out of me than they do currently.
So basically, I don't see what the issue here is. (And don't give my any bullshit about "branding." That's a load of crap.)
It's the crazy frog, y'know... (Score:5, Funny)
It may be the most popular ringtone in the world, but it makes me WANT TO KILL PEOPLE.
*twitch*
So, how about this; if you make the ads just a little less ANNOYING, not only will I stop blocking them so much, I will not come after the advertising executives WITH A BLUNT, RUSTY SPOON!
Google Text Ads (Score:3, Funny)
People don't block ads. People block annoyances. Witness the "click to play" Flash plugins as well.
Translation: (Score:3, Funny)
Ads Intrusive, Dangerous, Must Go! (Score:5, Insightful)
"In an offline world, what would happen in that case is that the 25c newspaper would cost $5," he said.
Apples and Oranges bud. In a paper, the ad doesn't redirect you to a [potentially rogue] site. How many users get linked to a Flash or JavaScript heavy ad with pop-ups? These ads are the bane of users everywhere, in particular those with slow connections.
I absolutely HATE a js or flash ad that I can't get rid of, that prevents me from seeing page content, or slows/hangs my machine.
Besides, click-through ads do NOT work as a form of advertising. 90% of internet users do not click through intentionally. Read: dot-crash, not a revenue model.
Given the opportunity to NOT download that 500k jpg... I'd take the opportunity.
Smith is oblivious (Score:5, Insightful)
Smith is obviously oblivious. He's talking as if the kind of intrusive, evasive ads his company does are the only kinds out there. To counter that, I'd point to Google. Google runs plenty of ads. They make lots of money off their ads. And nobody's up in arms about their ads, nor do you see anything being added to browsers to block them. That's because Google's ads are, as in a newspaper, clearly distinct from the content and don't interfere with the user getting at the actual content they're there for. And the ads are, gods help me, actually useful. More often than not, if I'm looking to buy what I'm searching for I find myself clicking through Google's ad links because I've found I'm likely to be able to buy what I was looking for. Smith simply isn't getting the hint, and if he doesn't he and the marketers like him will naturally go the way of the dinosaurs.
As for free content disappearing, I doubt it. Content supported soley by intrusive ads will disappear, but there's a lot of content out there that won't be affected:
Ads are okay, obnoxious ads aren't okay (Score:3, Insightful)
I use Mozilla and Firefox and regularly block ads, but I only block ads that prance, dance, blink, flash, bounce, jiggle, and otherwise annoy the crap out of me.
Those kinds of ads are not acceptable, because they're really distracting when you're trying to read and comprehend the real content of the web page.
I never bother to block normal ads, because they don't annoy me. Sometimes, they even look interesting, and I click on them.
Perhaps if advertisers would stop making obnoxious ads, there wouldn't be as much demand for ad blockers. But they've already shown themselves to have incredibly poor taste in ad design. Recall the living hell the web was before pop-up blockers became popular?
I suspect this is one of those areas where advertisers will just plain never get it, doing their best to make their ads stand out as much as possible...which is synonymous with making them obnoxious.
only blocking OBTRUSIVE ads by default (Score:3, Insightful)
Even *if* EVERYONE was automatically filtering out the traditional (BIG-annoying-BLINKBLINK-CLICKMENOW!) ads by default, it wouldn't be the "end of free internet content". For one thing, the cost of hosting has dropped dramatically since the Adfree-early-90's, but more importantly, money isn't the incentive that gets the best content online.
And about the complaint against Firefox:
1) Firefox's Adblock extension isn't installed by default, and very few people install extensions.
2) The Adblock extension doesn't come with a prepopulated blocklist - you have to create your own as you go or download one. 3) Far more adblocking is probably done by corporate proxies to pinch pennies.
Free to Improve (Score:3, Insightful)
You know what? (Score:5, Informative)
Advertisers: Don't remove control from the user. (Score:4, Insightful)
The worst offender I've seen lately was a new "punch the monkey" style add. It was flash based of course. Normally these ads are just animated banners, but the designer of this one got the clever idea of putting sound into the ad. The chosen sound was quite possibly the most obnoxious sound possible. It sounded like my speakers were pumping out radio static.
Now this is a flash ad right, so you should be able to right click on it and stop it from playing, and stop the flash from looping. Nope. The creator of the flash disabled all controls. The location of this advertising wasn't bad, it wasn't obtrusive, it wasn't in the way, but it was still noticeable. The problem was, I was jamming to my iTunes library at the time, something totally unrelated to web browsing.
Advertisers: This is your problem. You removed all control. My only options were to not read the content at all or block your ad. Seeing as the content was important to me, the only option left to me was to install AdBlock. And as you had just royally pissed me off, I didn't just block the one ad that was annoying me, I blocked all the advertising from your domain(s). If you've let one obnoxious ad get out to the internet, I'm sure it's not the only one.
Go out there and learn some principles of user interface design. One of them is that the user should feel in control. As soon as you remove control, the user is going to take action to regain control. Pop-Ups and Pop-Unders are other good examples. You're creating new windows that I didn't ask for! Not only are they getting in the way of my web browsing, they are getting in the way of other things I'm doing on my computer. Again, my options are to block advertising or close my web browser. Both are options you don't want, so don't force me to take these actions in the first place.
I do not mind ads on web pages myself. I don't even mind transition advertising where you click a link, and instead of getting the next page of an article you are reading you get a full page advertisement, and another link to continue to your article. Where web pages use these "transition" ads I've felt they were relevant to the content was viewing, and felt no need to block them.
Any time I'm not in control of what my computer is up to, you've gone too far and you have left me with no choice but to install ad blocking software. If you had left the user in control of their computer, you would have had much less to worry about. Now though, your practices have spawned countless pieces of ad blocking software. The software was made to block the obnoxious ads that should never have existed, but now that it's out there, there is no stopping it from blocking everything your industry does. You left us users with no other choice, and now you will feel the consequences of your actions.
userContent.css (Score:3, Interesting)
a[href*="doubleclick.net/"] img { display: none ! important }
*[width="729"][height="90"] { display: none ! important }
*[width="728"][height="90"] { display: none ! important }
*[width="550"][height="150"] { display: none ! important }
*[width="468"][height="60"] { display: none ! important }
*[width="336"][height="90"] { display: none ! important }
*[width="336"][height="280"] { display: none ! important }
*[width="300"][height="250"] { display: none ! important }
*[width="220"][height="120"] { display: none ! important }
*[width="180"][height="150"] { display: none ! important }
*[width="160"][height="600"] { display: none ! important }
*[width="150"][height="60"] { display: none ! important }
*[width="125"][height="125"] { display: none ! important }
*[width="120"][height="600"] { display: none ! important }
*[width="125"][height="300"] { display: none ! important }
a img[src*="468x60"] { display: none ! important }
img[onload] { display: none ! important; }
iframe[src] { display: none ! important; }
body script { display: none ! important; }
div.contextclick a[name^="ra"] {
text-decoration: none ! important;
border-bottom: 0px ! important;
color: inherit ! important;
}
#DCol { display: none ! important }
#CCol { display: none ! important }
div.showcases { display: none ! important }
div.showcase { display: none ! important }
div.scSpon { display: none ! important }
div[style="border: 2px solid rgb(51, 102, 153); padding: 6px; margin-bottom: 10px;"] { display: none ! important; }
span.artText P.ArticleBody + P[align="right"] + table[width="180"][align="left"] {
display: none ! important;
}
object[codebase*=flash] { display: none ! important; }
object[code-base*=flash] { display: none ! important; }
embed[type*=flash] { display: none ! important; }
And that's just what slashcode only slightly mangles.
woops (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good call (Score:5, Interesting)
I know this is probably not in my own best interest, but, like I said, I don't care. When I get this pissed off about a thing, sometimes logic goes out the window, and what will happen to the 'free internet' is secondary to my desire to see slimeballs like that double-click guy flushed down the crapper.
Re:Good call (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good call (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine you're reading a newspaper.
Suddenly a clown springs from the newspaper and begins yelling offers at you.
You suddenly flip the page to get rid of him. Then a monkey starts bothering you until you punch him. But when you do, an executive salesman comes out from the alley and tells you "Hello! You won a prize! Please sign!"
"Get away from me!" You run away, and sit in a bench. "Now, where was I?" you say, as you flip to the next page.
Then a gorgeus girl starts flirting with you, until you notice she begins to pick your pocket. You quickly flip the page.
"HELP!!" you yell. Then you hear a "psst psst" from the back of the newspaper. It's a firefox.
It comes out, and scares all those annoying people away. You feel it's friendly, so you let it rest on your shoulder.
Now you can read your newspaper in peace.
(hey can someone make an internet ad out of this idea? It's public domain)
Give FOX some time. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Praise Bob! (Score:3, Insightful)
One fundamental problem is, popularity comes at a price. Your website is more popular, more bandwidth gets used. More bandwidth gets used, your hosting provider charges you more.
It's not so with TV shows. The costs are the same whether 8 people or 8 billion people watch it. Of course, if you have consistently low ratings, advertisers don't want to pay you for their ads.
If internet technologies get to the point where band