French ISP Blocking Web Ads By Default 317
New submitter GavrocheLeGnou writes "The french ISP 'Free.fr' is now blocking ads from Adsense and other providers by default for all its subscribers. The option can be turned off globally, but there's no whitelist (Google translation of French original). From the article: 'Because the service doesn’t offer a whitelist (contrary to Adblock, a service I’ve used for years), this means that it is an all or nothing choice, activated by default to block everything. And since it is not only internet, but TV and phone lines running through the FreeBox, it’s possible that, if left unchecked, Free could beginning blocking TV ads, or phone calls from known spam hotlines. While this seems like a potentially beneficial service, there’s no doubt that it’s biting at the heels of several sectors who rely on advertisement to make money, let alone the advertisers themselves who pay to reach an audience, and are blocked at the door.'"
Never Heard of Them (Score:5, Funny)
re: They should advertise more (Score:3, Insightful)
They just did!
Remember good French Slashdot readers, it is the French ISP Free.fr that is doing this! What Free.fr is doing might be controversial! But never ever forget that Free.fr is innovating in the internet marketing space!
Ad networks should be considered hostile (Score:5, Insightful)
Ad networks should be considered hostile and blocked at all opportunitie. Why?
Take *one* look at any download service and the massive amounts of fake "Download" buttons you can press. Adware. Spyware. Malware. It's all there, unless you have the technical wherewithal to separate the good from the bad... Something most people don't.
So for the average user the choice comes down to this: Adblock or infection.
Clearly, the only responsible choice is to block ads.
Re: Ad networks should be considered hostile (Score:4, Insightful)
Ad networks should be considered hostile and blocked at all opportunitie. Why?
Take *one* look at any download service and the massive amounts of fake "Download" buttons you can press. Adware. Spyware. Malware. It's all there, unless you have the technical wherewithal to separate the good from the bad... Something most people don't.
So for the average user the choice comes down to this: Adblock or infection.
Clearly, the only responsible choice is to block ads.
I'm all for blocking the "bad" ads like you mention, but the likes of Adsense tend to be pretty harmless and out of the way (occasionally even useful), so blocking *all* ads seems counterproductive. Far better to draw up some industry guidelines for what constitutes a good ad and block things that fall outside those guidelines.
OTOH, Google's ads on Youtube have definitely crossed the line, and blocking those would be a good thing.
Re: (Score:3)
[...]this means that it is an all or nothing choice, activated by default to block everything.
It's a choice. Opt out of the filter. Actually, opt in for ads.
Day-um! (Score:2)
The adblocking war just went nuclear!
I wonder what the media/advertising uber-cartel's response will be? "No media for you!"? Lawsuits galore?
I'm gonna pop some popcorn and pull up a comfy chair. This...could...be...AMAZING.
Re: (Score:3)
Ad-supported content sites can start blocking requests from free.fr pretty easily. Not sure how long this will last.
Not the ISP's problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Blocking the crap is just value added to their clients service IMHO.
I certainly wish there was such a convenient ISP service near home.
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I wonder how much bandwidth the ISP will save by not downloading crap like that.
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I imagine a lot of customers actually asked the ISPs to block all the stuff they are not paying for.
Looking after the 5% (Score:2)
Blocking the crap is just value added to their clients service IMHO.
I'm not so keen to have my ISP define the word "crap" for me, but since it's an opt in thing all it will do is cut out 5% of the advertisers audience who would do it via their own ad-blockers anyway, sending ads to that 5% is counter-productive. It's like delivering junk snail mail to a "no junk mail" box, you know the recipient will just get angry at you. Advertisers (as opposed to ad distributors) may actually benefit from those people excluding themselves from that particular medium, it will be the middl
Re: (Score:2)
So what? Since when is a business a good thing whose only source of revenue is advertising? Ever went to a store that gives away everything for free but forces you to watch lots of ads?
Re:Not the ISP's problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Most companies should make money from products, not the ads. Find another way to get knowledge of your products out without being obnoxious to your potential customers. If a company associates with such depraved people as internet advertisers then the company deserves to lose its customers.
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Most companies should make money from products, not the ads.
So do you think Google should start charging for searches, Gmail, YouTube or Maps first? Which Internet news aggregator site would you prefer to pay for your news? How much per month do you think most people want to pay for Facebook?
Advertisers pay for the stuff you nominally get for free on radio, OTA television or the Internet. There is nothing wrong with this model, if people are willing to accept the bargain that "I don't pay for this but they want to show me ads." If you don't want to be party to that
A big win (Score:3, Interesting)
I would pay additional money for services like this, in the US. Maybe not for internet, since adblock does a fine job at preventing my consciousness from being polluted by bullshit. But for things like Hulu, or TV...
My wife watches Hulu when she wants to see something that I haven't set up to be auto-pirated with sickbeard/sabnzb/couchpotato. It amazes me the crap people will allow into their brains. "You could save fifteen percent on car..." "FUCK OFF, I'm already a Geico customer, WHY DO I HAVE TO HEAR THIS SHIT?!"
I won't pay for Cable TV but I probably would if I could get TV without advertising.
Yeah, yeah, the industry is driven by advertising, blah blah, guess what, I don't give a shit, totally not my problem, if they want my money, they can start by providing a service that I want. TV with ads? Do not want. I'll keep giving my money to a premium usenet provider, thanks.
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As usual. (Score:2)
If you are a water vendor and it begins to rain, you need a new business model.
Ad companies could get bankrupt? (Score:4, Insightful)
I fail to see the downside.
Re:Ad companies could get bankrupt? (Score:5, Insightful)
easy: all sites that live thanks to advertising, even to good ones that provide valuable content and have not-too-obnoxious ads (arstechnica comes to mind), no longer make any money at all.
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To quote the master:
"By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalization for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: 'There's gonna be a joke comin' up.' There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borrow a pistol fr
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Because a certain ad company *google* makes my life (and those of others) far...FAR...better.
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As long as there is a competitor around, I'm all for it. Why not let the market sort it out? Let's see whether people prefer their internet with or without ads, with or without porn...
As long as it is neither mandated by law nor impossible to turn off, what's your problem with it?
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I fail to see the downside.
replace ad's with porn, and you can see the slippery slope.
The down side of the porn becoming slippery? Well, that's an advantage so big it get's me all wet.
(ducks)
Re: (Score:2)
These are advertisements, not information. Customers did not pay to get advertisements, they paid to get access to the internet! This ISP does have an opt-out so if a customer really does want to see ads then they can do so.
Advertisers have proven that they will not play fair or pay for their usage of the bandwidth, so we should not be making any excuses for them. Even with junk mail the sender has to pay for it, imagine if you had to pay for every piece of junk mail you got from the post office.
Porn Filters (Score:2)
Hope we get these with our porn filters in the UK
There's another side to that story (Score:5, Interesting)
Free is a major French ISP, also just breaking into the mobile phone market with rock-bottom prices. They've always been at the forefront of the price war, and without them we probably still wouldn't have $40 ADSL with unlimited phone, TV..., nor $27/month for mobile with unlimited data/voice/texts, and no restrictions on VOIP, tethering... full net neutrality in fact. So up to now, they've undoubtedly been Good Guys.
They have a long-standing dispute with Google though, about who should pay for bigger tubes between their servers and YouTube, which is unusable at peak time for Free subscribers. Free have been advising their clients to use Dailymotion instead, and don't want to pay for extra bandwidth. Free users are very dissatisfied, and this is becoming a *major* issue.
The ad-blocking move, which seems right now to target mainly Google, is probably mostly a bargaining chip to get Google to pay for better YouTube access for Free.
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Free is a major French ISP,[...] and no restrictions on VOIP, tethering... full net neutrality in fact. [...] They have a long-standing dispute with Google though, about who should pay for bigger tubes between their servers and YouTube, which is unusable at peak time for Free subscribers. Free have been advising their clients to use Dailymotion instead, and don't want to pay for extra bandwidth. Free users are very dissatisfied, and this is becoming a *major* issue.
The ad-blocking move, which seems right now to target mainly Google, is probably mostly a bargaining chip to get Google to pay for better YouTube access for Free.
How is that net neutral?
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Very interesting gossip, thanks! It's worth observing that Free only blocks cross site adds, meaning self hosted ads still work. In particular google's ads on google searches should still work.
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nor $27/month for mobile with unlimited data/voice/texts, and no restrictions on VOIP, tethering... full net neutrality in fact. So up to now, they've undoubtedly been Good Guys.
As much as I agree they've been the good guys and drove the market price down, it's just plain wrong that you've been enjoying "full net neutrality". Free has been doing throttling of connections to Youtube, so much that sometimes, it was very difficult to watch (had to wait for buffering). Free here, is just doing business: probably they had not succeeded in having agreements with Google the way they wanted. It wouldn't be the first time they act this way with peers.
Re:There's another side to that story (Score:5, Insightful)
How is blocking ads net neutrality?
Because it's under user control. Or do you believe that net neutrality is only achieved if the ISP refuses to block anything, even at he request of the user? No spam blockers, no virus attack blockers, no DDoS prevention for your server, nothing.
ISP should offer two services:
1. Dumb data pipe.
2. Optional (entirely under user control) firewalling or content filtering of the data that is in tat pipe.
Not everyone can figure out how to block access to porn (or at least in such a way that their kids would not be able to circumvent it easily) or filter spam or properly configure a firewall. The ISP should offer a service of firewall, blocking, QoS* etc, but also provide a way for user to say "No, just give me the packets without tampering with them"
When I had DSL, I would have liked very much if I could assign lower priority on my torrents so that they do not clog my connection. I could do prioritize packets while uploading them, but I could not do anything about downloaded packets (since if the packet is in my router it already passed the bottleneck). It would have been nice if I could tell my ISP to prioritize games and HTTP over torrents.
When the ISP does this over the entire network (prioritizing someone elses HTTP over my torrents) it's annoying, but I would have liked to have a way of prioritizing my own HTTP over my own torrents.
Increased efficiency. (Score:4)
This probably cuts the ISP's network traffic in half.
There will be screams from advertisers. Tough. Nobody is forcing you to run a web site supported by third-party ads. This doesn't affect web sites that sell their own products, from Amazon on down. It doesn't affect search much, although it may impact Google's AdSense business. Bing; not so much. Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, HP, etc. don't run third party ads on their own sites. Facebook runs their own ads on their own site.
It might impact low-rent sites like Slashdot, bloggers who want to get paid for their blithering, and other minor annoyances. But the web can run just fine without third-party ads.
Even advertisers may benefit. About 80% of third-party ad clicks come from a small number of users, under 20%, who will click on anything and buy almost nothing. Many SEO experts advise their Google advertisers to opt out of the "Google content network" and just run ads that appear with search results. Search ads appear when someone is looking for the item of interest and likely to buy. AdSense ads are just noise.
Re: (Score:2)
Sort of annoying that I have ATT, and they do their web mail through Yahoo. So without ad blocking I would essentially see advertisements sponsored by an ISP I'm paying for. Ok, so that's exactly like cable television where you pay and still get ads so maybe not so weird... I guess everyone's realized that they can just keep shoveling more crap at us and get away with it.
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You already HAVE the choice to not see ads by not visiting my blog. Why the fuck do you need an ISP to make that decision for you?
Network Neutrality Violation (Score:5, Insightful)
While all the posts here so far are in favor of this move, it is a very bad thing, and not just for the publishers that depend on ad revenue. If my browser has requested data from the internet, by default the ISP's job is to faithfully forward those requests and the responses to me, not to selectively block, modify, or even inspect the packets I have sent. To do otherwise is a violation of network neutrality.
This is bad because it can be abused by the ISP to serve their goals, and not that of the user. For example, in this case the founder of Free, Xavier Niel, is also a partial owner of the newspaper Le Monde, and by some reports ads are not being blocked on that site, while they are on others. Other accounts give different results with ad blocking, so that may not be intentional, but regardless it is a good hypothetical example of why this can be a very bad idea. It is one thing if the ISP offers additional services that the user can opt-in to use, but very different if they require users to opt-out (many of whom may not even know/understand that the ISP is modifying their traffic).
Hyperbole and baloney (Score:2, Informative)
You can turn adblocking off. Versus a non-neutral net where you can't do a damn thing over how your ISP shapes your traffic. Big difference. Or would say Dish networks recent attempts to automatically remove ads is not neutral?
Like to confuse the issue, huh? I swear some of you people are just astroturfers with a brain. Half a brain though.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes yes, slippery slope. You are of course ideologically correct. This is the free market solution, when really we need government solutions to the scourge of advertising which blights our societies.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions as they say! But I am curious, where I am from, there are often spam calls to my telephone, offering all sorts of prizes if i give all my information to them. Should the telco not try and block these calls for the benefit of society? I am just trying to say that the
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Have I as a consumer ever told a third party web site that I want to see advertisements? No, I have not. These advertisements are piggybacking on my ISP and making me pay for it!
Maybe there's an ideal towards network neutrality, but idealism is often tossed out when under duress. If the advertisers are not playing fair and taking advantage of us then I think it is safe to ignore net neutrality when it comes to advertisers.
Re: (Score:3)
You have told a website that you want to see it. It sends you the page.
Part of that page is information that the website includes content from a third party.
Your browser then goes and asks for the third party content.
If you don't want to see that content, then your browser shouldn't ask for it.
It is quite easy not to, you simply add noscript and adblock. Or apparently, if you are french you can have your ISP block it for you.
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Shortsighted (Score:3)
Site operators will block content if ads aren't served. Today, some sites will deliberately not function when ad blocking is detected, but this is not yet wide-spread. That policy is going to become ubiquitous if ISPs start blocking ads for all users.
Right now the arms race between advertisers and ad blockers is low intensity because ad blocking is limited to a small fraction of content consumers. Now that ISPs are monkeying around with ad blocking the race will escalate. The advertisers are going to de
Re: (Score:2)
What you're talking about is the end to end principle, where the blocking of ads should happen at the end point of the communication, ie the computer running the browser. That's a technical principle, which is useful to preserve the correctness of the communications, because it's too difficult to anticipate all consequences of a change in the network. However, that ship has sailed. The net is already full of boxes that modify TCP/IP content on
No problem (Score:2)
Free doesn't block ads served by the hosting site, only cross site ads. I believe many big newspapers host their own ads, right? Le Monde's ads are likely viewable for that reason.
Any idea if Free is blocking the user tracking sites used by Le Monde? I'm counting 4-5 trackers on lemonde.fr, way less than the NYT's 12-15, but still some revenue.
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The email is the service I'm using on the net. This is about net neutrality not email neutrality.
Dear Slashdot, I have a major problem (Score:5, Funny)
My town recently passed a law blocking people from defecating in peoples yards and spitting in their faces at random. One can opt out of the new law (and continue being spat at) completely, however there is no whitelist for white listing positive spitters and defecators that I do want to receive spit from. This means that its either an all or nothing choice, activated by default to block everything.
While this seems like a potentially beneficial service, there's no doubt that it's biting at the heels of several sectors who rely on cleaning up shit and spit to make money, let alone the spitters and defecators themselves who try hard to eat and drink as much as possible to reach an audience, and are now blocked at the door.
Re:Dear Slashdot, I have a major problem (Score:4, Funny)
"however there is no whitelist for white listing positive spitters and defecators that I do want to receive spit from."
Thanks to the internet I know such a whitelist would be a valued service in some quarters.
Could someone please provide the same service... (Score:3)
I cannot help but feeling pissed of each time I buy one film and am forced to endure minutes of ads against pirating (But I even paid the bloody thing!) or for films I will not see or for violent films when the DVD contains a cartoon for the kids.
And have you noticed all those films on the walls for things you do not want nor ear about? They have been flourishing in Paris lately. They catch your eyes, because your eyes will look at moving things, however hard you try to ignore them. The ad industry has become a sheer nuisance.
Meanwhile, as a Free.fr subscriber, I am not so sure the move is smart, especially since it would be activated by default (one has to reboot the box to upgrade the firmware, and I do it twice a year or so, haven't done it yet).
I do accept some dose of advertisement on sites, but no flash by default, Flashblock is my friend. That suffices me up to now. Manwhile, I would appreciate Porn blocking, by default. All ads? Perhaps too bold a move.
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I cannot help but feeling pissed of each time I buy one film and am forced to endure minutes of ads against pirating (But I even paid the bloody thing!) or for films I will not see or for violent films when the DVD contains a cartoon for the kids.
The obvious solution is to rip the DVD and reburn it to a blank DL disc. DVDFabDecrypter even has a preset specifically to rip just the movie portion, removing all previews and piracy warnings. Replace the original clamshell case for the DVD with a two-disc one and stick your original on one side for safe-keeping (and to prove you actually paid for the content if the MPAA ever gets those gestapo search squads they've always wanted), and put the new disc on the other side. Play only the burned disc.
Bonus: If
Sounds amazing (Score:2)
Too bad Comcast doesn't offer packages like that...
VPN (Score:2)
Will the IP range be banned? (Score:2)
Not that I support it, but it shouldn't be much problems to stop delivering to the IP range from this ISP for french newspapers. It's really a short-lived story for the customers of this ISP.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, my thoughts as well. "You don't want my ads? Don't waste my bandwidth!"
Any significant escalation in the ads vs ad-blocking conflict ends up screwing over users in some way or another - reduced access to content, buggy scripts that must run to view the page, the likes.
A shot a Google? (Score:2)
Speaking of Ads.. (Score:2)
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Good for society (Score:2)
Adverts are little attention-getters that push buttons to make you do things you don't want to do. It could be that they're causing us to do a number of other weird things too as a side effect - like get unreasonably violent and agressive. This is of particular suspicion in the US where foreigners meeting US advertisements for the first time get a big culture shock. Could this "Shock! Get yours now!" subliminal message be driving roberies, greed, rape and other undesirable behaviour, which let's face it is
How can that ISP be blocked? (Score:2)
Not getting rich on advertising by far, but if they're that determined on being overt and callus freeloaders so much as to prevent any chance of revenue that helps support my costs, I am not interested in having them visit my sites.
It's free.fr commercial interest to save bandwidth (Score:3)
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Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't advertising, it's how some websites go about it in a less than straight forward manner and not so much anymore, but some used to be really annoying, like the recursive jscript ad pop-up.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Funny)
The internet would still be a bunch of news groups if it wasn't for advertising.
I don't really know... are you arguing for or against ads? Your "threat" might be seen as a promise.
Re:Good. (Score:4, Interesting)
The internet would still be a bunch of news groups if it wasn't for advertising.
I don't really know... are you arguing for or against ads? Your "threat" might be seen as a promise.
Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but only a Luddite could possibly see the expansion of news groups into what we have today as a BadThing(TM). Seriously, "there is no such thing as a free lunch", news groups in the early days were funded mainly by the taxpayer, advertising pays for the banquet of free content we now enjoy. If you have a better funding model for providing free content on the same scale as radio/TV/internet combined, we'd all like to hear it.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Newsgroups in the early days were funded by institutions, not all of which were taxpayer funded. Corporations used the newsgroups too. Members essentially paid their own way.
Explain then why on pay cable television we're still subjected to ads? Every time there is an advertisement free medium the vultures swoop in to ruin it. If advertising is so great then why do the advertisers continually resort to dirty tricks? People are using ad blockers out of self defense against an active assault. Have a few small unobnoxious ads and people wouldn't mind. But fill up 2/3rds or more of a web page with junk ads that slows down your computer and internet then of course people are going to fight back.
What we have today is a bad thing. There is not the information future that was envisioned, instead if's lots of media being fed to a passive drooling audience.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
The internet would still be a bunch of news groups if it wasn't for advertising: ...
Like Wikipedia, you mean?
advertising spurred people to create and advance content
Ah, yes, we wouldn't have FaeceBook without advertising.
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While they don't have ads, they often have huge "Give us money!!" banners, which are just as annoying, if not more annoying than normal ads.
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that was a real WTF comment. how is a polite plea showing up once in a blue moon more annoying than autoplaying videos, flashing banners and "you can skip this ad in 5 4 3 2 1" welcome pages?
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That said, I've given to Wikipedia before. Not lately though, I got too sick of their ads.
Of course, I use adblock, so I see very little of the normal kind of ads.
As for this article, I don't care if it hurts the people who are paying for ads to be p
Re:Good. (Score:4, Informative)
I see you have never been to the educational parts of the internet that are interdependently sourced. There are still plenty of sites out there that provided a wealth of knowledge that are funded (usually only partly) by the ads they have. A less independent example is youtube, there are a lot of shit content creators that rake in cash for making crap content BUT there are also a bunch of awesome people out there that make interesting educational and useful videos that are partly or fully funded by their ad revenue. Just because you go to shitty websites that serve shitty adds doesn't mean they should all be done away with. It means you need to stop surfing the braindead sections of the internet.
Look up Bill Beaty, Mike's Electric stuff, Jeri Elssworth, Ben Krasnow, Woodgears.ca, Smarter every day. They are all do what they do because they like it and to be educational but they earned every 1/10th of a penny for each page or video view. Blocking ads on an individual basis is fine, most people don't do it. Blocking ads as an ISP is fucking the hand that feeds you.
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I kinda miss the usenet. Those were the good old days. At least until the spammers arrived. And Scientology sporge in 2000.
An all-free no advertising internet might be a good thing. Kinda like a world with only FOSS computers, no Apple or Windows. Sure, the general public would miss their Twitter and Facebook but computer geeks would rejoice.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I kinda miss the usenet. Those were the good old days. At least until the spammers arrived. And Scientology sporge in 2000.
An all-free no advertising internet might be a good thing. Kinda like a world with only FOSS computers, no Apple or Windows. Sure, the general public would miss their Twitter and Facebook but computer geeks would rejoice.
Assuming there was anyone around to keep running the servers for free, of course.
I'm pretty damn certain there's a not-insignificant amount of computer geeks who depend an awful lot on services which today are nearly entirely ad-supported, geeks who would be shocked — SHOCKED, mind you — at the prospect of having to pay for those services on a "supposedly all-free internet". And these are the sorts of services which are a bit too big for the platonic ideal from decades ago of "one nerd hacking
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
We're still paying today, sometimes a significant amount of money just to get internet connections. We're actually paying much more money today than we did 10 or 20 years ago. The advertisers are not paying for their ads out of their own pockets, they've figured out that other people will pay for the bandwidth necessary to send the ads out.
We get spam clogging our email, we have popups annoying us, we have our computers and networks being slowed down. I have to pay money when they send me a text message to my phone, I don't even answer my home phone anymore even though it rings 4 or 5 times a day since it's all telemarketers despite being on the no-call list. These people are evil and we shouldn't be making excuses for them.
If the advertisers are leeching off of all of us then I have no qualms putting up ad blockers and leeching off of them.
Re:Good. (Score:4, Funny)
I kinda miss the usenet.
Please add me to the list!
Me, too!
Re: (Score:3)
I kinda miss the usenet.
Please add me to the list!
Me, too!
Yup, agreed Usenet was one of the NO CARRIER
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And advertisement is essentially what killed off usenet. Even though it's still limping along inside Google there is no longer any information left. Because it's essentially free to churn out as many ads as wanted it was too easy to drown actual content.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertising should just be a side business, it's the overhead necessary to sell an actual product which is the core business. However it seems that too many advertisers want to treat it like the primary business. People talk about the advertising industry like it's a major manufacturing conglomerate.
The problem with ads on the net is that they don't behave. Advertising may be necessary for a product but they've gone out of their way to be obnoxious and rude. Animated picures and flash ads suck up noticeable amounts of processing time, the initial reason I went about blocking ads. They've abused windows pop ups. It bloats up the internet content without paying its way. Back with faxes ads used to tie up the lines and block actual information from arriving in a timely manner. Advertisers have essentially done everyone in the power to become hated. So of course customers want ad blocking in self defense. Sorry to all of you who make your living with advertising but war is hell and you're working for the enemy.
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Which is why I block popups and flash. But that's not a reason to also block still images.
U R the product: re Side business v. main business (Score:3, Interesting)
.
Sometimes, people forget the obvious because it is well hidden from us with shell games. (Q1) Why are google and its googlicious products free of cost to use? (Q2) If newspapers cost so much money to buy, then why do they tend to give them out for free just before Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays? (Q3) What do magazines really sell if not the content which is in them?
.
(a1) -- Go
Re: (Score:2)
Where the fuck were you when the internet had been up and running for several years? It was more than newsgroups, it was content without the BS of needing to be compensated for it. People devoted their time and own damn money for websites long before advertizing got on the scene, and it was much better then.
What has advertizing brought, but a plague? Pay-walls, SEOs, multiple fucking flash advertizements all playing the instant the page loads up. I'd rather the web without advertizements than all the freemi
Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
I would actually lose track of plot lines because of 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there. The show comes back on, and I have to think for a moment: who are these people? What was I watching? What was this week's episode about?
Of course I've found that many shows are geared around that, so when watching without ads you notice a lot of repeated information that could be removed to make the show even shorter without missing anything. Reality type shows are especially bad about that, the total "show" is often only half or so of the total air time after you factor in ad breaks and re-caps due to them.
Re: (Score:3)
Yep. That information repetition is especially noticeable when watching certain shows on a service like Netflix.
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Advertising is a problem in that a large percentage of the people don't want the intrusive all pervasive advertising that advertisers keep pushing on us because we don't pay enough attention to them.
In the real world, a door to door salesman isn't allowed to keep pounding on your door and ringing the doorbell continuously and run around to all the windows in your house holding up pictures and peering i
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Aye, instead the internet should be nothing but pay walls.
Your only options will be Geocities level free sites or to pay to see anything worth while.
Re: (Score:2)
Baloney, searching for information is tons easier today. I recall in my college days using Vivisimo to cluster search results to try to get more useful results; i havent done that in about 6 years because Google has gotten so much better at searching that its simply not necessary.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Weird. When I search on Google the first three million results are usually ad farms that have no bearing on what I was searching for, and then about ten million results in I find someone's personal web page with the information I actually wanted.
When did Google 'get so much better at searching'? Everything they've done in the last few years seems to have been designed to give me more and more unrelated results ('I'm going to give you results for what you searched for and for any word I think is vaguely similar, because you obviously don't know what you really wanted to search for'), and not the ones I actually want.
Re: (Score:2)
Really? Give us a search phrase so we can verify this for ourselves at google.com. I dare you.
Re:Good. (Score:4, Interesting)
Do them a favor. Since you're looking for that info, perhaps you have a related or semi-related (in some way) blog or site? Write an article with related content to that you found, incorporating and expanding on it in some way. Put links within that content, in meaningful contexts, with words showing for the link relevant to the linked content, within this post or essay of yours. Publish online, and making sure to link to from blogger or something, to get it fast-indexed by Google and raise the pagerank of the site that was useful to you...
And you're done. Yes, I do this for people and sites out there. And I agree, I often find what's needed on obscure non-corporate/farm/business/institutional pages.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Finding worthwhile information on the web was much, much easier before the rise of advertising.
I'm old enough that my son ran his own BBS in the late 80's, had access (via a university) to the internet before it was the internet, was studying for a CS degree when HTML was invented (didn't "get it" immediately, few people did). It's far from an exaggeration to say information has never been easier to find in the entire history of mankind, nor has there ever been so much information of both types, useful and useless. For people like me who used to loan from the non-fiction section of the library, the internet is like having the world's technical and scientific libraries at your fingertips. Sure it's not the jet pack I was promised, but it's a pretty good consolation prize.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Say goodbye to google, youtube, Twitter, Slashdot, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Gmail, Yahoo mail, drudge report, yahoo, bing, and probably a lot of others.
Im going to guess that sites in that list make up more than 50% of your web-usage by site-hit per day, and including youtube probably 80% of your web traffic.
But sure, they all have "bad business models", despite being some of the biggest sites on the internet.
Re: (Score:2)
With the exception of the google sites, all of those use third party advertisement.
Re: (Score:2)
And I think the point is that they should stop.
If you want to have an ad on your site you should take responsibility for it. That doesn't mean you can't have an advertising company supply you with ads, but I'm getting google supplied adds on LordLimecat.com you're not taking responsibility for what you're showing me, or how that information is being used to track me across sites.
Admittedly, it's an idealistic pipe dream. But I think that's the point he's trying to make.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't mind ads...at all. Seriously. And I don't think most people care either.
Re:Good. (Score:4, Funny)
Frankly this is a little ignorant. The internet is not for any one thing.
Yes, it is [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
And the ISP can setup a transparent proxy to twart that, it's users will notice a little bit of lag at most.
Re: (Score:2)
> A niche ISP such as this with a globally insignificant user base
Free is not that kind of ISP. See http://francois04.free.fr/estimation.php [francois04.free.fr] for estimations of Free's number of subscribers.
Re: (Score:2)
If the amount of money that Free.fr customers are paying to Free.fr each month does not cover the costs of delivering all those YouTube videos to those customers then Free.fr should increase their prices so that the amount that customers pay does cover the costs of delivering the content. Its like any business, if what the customer is paying does not cover the costs of delivering the product or service, you increase the price of the product.
Not go after Google and YouTube demanding money.
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect the ad networks don't want to go down that road because it raises the bar for putting ads on your website. Also click tracking is an issue, if it's left up to the hoster of the site then click fraud becomes much easier, if it's done by the ad networks then it provides something that can be matched by a blocker.
Of course this move by free may force their hand.
Re: (Score:2)
Umm you don't need a credit card to live, this seems to be a US thing. I'm French and we just have a small, agreed on negative balance at the bank and/or take an ad hoc loan. No credit card involved, though quite some people fall for it anyway and become "super-indebted". Most people carry a smartcard that can only pay with money you have at the bank. And negative balance up to half your monthly income can be pretty much free of charge.