Adblock Plus Maker Seeks Deal With Ad Industry Players (yahoo.com) 356
An anonymous reader writes with Yahoo's report that the makers of Adblock Plus are "looking to reach out to advertisers and identify an 'acceptable' level and form of advertising on the net." That involves convincing advertisers to conform to the company's own guidelines for advertising, or an alternative path much disliked by some of the software's users — to pay the company to ignore ads that don't meet those guidelines. From the article:
Big websites can pay a fee not to be blocked. And it is these proceeds that finance the Cologne-based company and its 49-strong workforce. While Google and Amazon have paid up, others refuse.
Axel Springer, which publishers Germany's best-selling daily Bild, accuses [Adblock Plus maker] Eyeo of racketeering.
"We believe Eyeo's business model is against the law," a spokesman for Springer told AFP.
"Clearly, Eyeo's primary aim is to get its hands on a share of the advertising revenues."
Ultimately, such practices posed a threat to the professional journalism on the web, he suggested, an argument Eyeo rejects.
No such thing (Score:5, Insightful)
"identify an 'acceptable' level and form of advertising on the net."
That will be hard to find since such a thing does not exist.
Re:No such thing (Score:5, Insightful)
The moment an ad turns into a tracking device there are good reasons to block it.
Re:No such thing (Score:5, Insightful)
- No tracking
- No animation
- No sound
- No Javascript
- No plugins / Flash
- No third party hosts
- No delays >10ms to auction the ad
- Max 10Kb of data
- No adult content unless its an adult site
- No obfuscated links
- No more than 10% of the page area
- No mixing ads and content, ads must be clearly separated and identified
- No overlays
- No interstitials
In addition, AdBlock must enforce these rules in the plug-in, i.e. whitelisted ads get overriden if it detects they contain scripts or >10kb of data or make the page take >50ms extra to load.
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All of that sounds reasonable and feasible, except for the "No Tracking" bit. The moment a 3rd party ad is rendered they have some information about you. At the very least, this is the URL of the site you're visiting, which may sound harmless enough, but it also usually carries information about your search terms (i.e. in Google) or your shopping habits (i.e. categories you're browsing on Amazon). And in the case of large ad networks which serve ads on most sites that you visit - well, they get a pretty det
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Unfortunately there is nothing stopping the website owner from tracking this information and reporting it back to the ad provider, acting mainly as a proxy (so you access http://yourfavouritesite/somea... [yourfavouritesite] and they just make a request on their end to http://eviladcompany/?all_that... [eviladcompany] and serve up the results).
The one thing it would make harder is cross-site tracking, but again, nothing stopping each site from serving up their own cookie, tying it to the generic ad companies id, and forwarding it to them (alt
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Re:No such thing (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm largely of this mindset, but as I said in an earlier comment somewhere, it's pretty hard to know what's being tracked or passed along on the server side. Server side tracking is more difficult than tracking that largely relies on client side mechanisms, but only just, and if pushback continues I think that's what we're going to see.
I for one would love to see more containerization on the browser side (prevent those facebook cookies from being sent unless you're actually on facebook) to become the norm, but unfortunately the rise of content distribution networks makes it hard to do this generically without breaking all the things, and a lot of people actually like the whole "oh, it knows my facebook, cool!" thing.
Re:No such thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe a generation change will fix this.
I worked at an ad agency at the dawn of the commercial Internet. The people on the advertising side of the business had all kinds of problems adapting.
The print people wanted it to be another print medium and were frustrated by their lack of layout control and font selection. Their tool was giant images with click regions because they could basically export an Illustrator file as a graphic, so you'd end up with sites that were just a giant collection of images with click regions that led you to more images with more click regions.
The TV people treated it like another TV set, at first with just inserted videos, next with semi-interactive Flash animations that still had all the intelligence of a one-way TV commercial.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant future the people who didn't grow up on standard, commercial television or tweaking print layouts down to the pixel AND who came of age frustrated by overlays, popups, interstitials and understand ad blocking will become ascendant and stop imposing old thinking on the web.
Re:No such thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertisers are moving to product and story placement now. Whole articles that are basically ads. Fake reviews. The next level of ad-blocking is to filter that crap out too.
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There seems to be some outer limit to this, at least at more legitimate sites because I see a lot of fake articles labeled as "sponsored content". Maybe I'm dreaming this, but didn't the commerce department make some noise about needing to label sponsored content as sponsored content? Or is this something that more legitimate news sites are doing to not totally alienate their readers?
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It depends on the legal jurisdiction. In the UK, for example, they are supposed to be labelled but it's a voluntary code and the line between "took journalist to lunch" and "paid for the article" is pretty fuzzy.
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" The next level of ad-blocking is to filter that crap out too."
I'd prefer a PeopleBlock, where I can enter names like Donald Trump, Kardashian, etc and never see anything of that.
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You basically eliminated everything.
- No Tracking (Can't be done otherwise you would get the same ad repeatedly, and is necessary for context-awareness)
- No Animation (Can be done, but I think you meant "no VIDEO" ads on non-video content)
- No Sound (It violates every legitimate ad network to do this already)
- No Javascript (Impossible, otherwise you will see the ads burned into the content of the website, which is actually worse, because it's hard to be context-aware this way, do you really want to see ads
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You CAN'T have ads without tracking. (Score:3)
That's never going to happen, so people who think that a compromise might some day be reached, need to let go of that.
Some of the things on the list are extremely easy because the browser itself is ultimately in control. If you don't want animation, for example, then your browser can elect to not animate things. Same for playing sound, executing Javascript, 10kb limit, etc. You're going to get your wish on all of that stuff, assuming you haven't already gotten it already.
But tracking isn't going to go awa
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But tracking isn't going to go away. Your computer is initiating a conversation with someone else's computer, and there's only one thing you can do to prevent someone else's computer from remembering that it happened: have there be nothing to remember, because nothing happened. i.e. don't request the ad.
My computer initiated a conversation with Site A. This does not mean that Site A should conference in Ad Network B to advertise at me without even notifying me of what they're doing. If Site A wants to get ad revenue, they can tell me directly about the advertised product, but clearly state that it's a paid ad and don't sell my personal information to third parties.
What would you think of someone who sold your contact info to telemarketers as soon as you called him or gave him your number?
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I'm fine with them delaying as long as they like to auction the ad, as long as that delay time is made before they start serving any content. Note, Google and other ranking algorithms count time to first byte in the quality of a site.
Re:No such thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh, if it:
- Stays quietly off to the side somewhere
- Clearly distinguishable as an ad
- Doesn't slow down page load time
- Isn't a scam
- Preferrably doesn't do an excessive amount of tracking
It's acceptable in my books.
That said, the adblock guys are about to blow their own foot off. Nothing they do is that complicated, there are already workable alternatives.. the only reason they are so popular is that they've "just worked" for the longest, but it won't take much of this crap before they see their entire userbase migrate to something else.
Re:No such thing (Score:5, Insightful)
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They kind of have to do this. As mobile takes over, AdBlock is less and less prevalent - and the web is less and less usable. It's potentially interesting that Google has signed on to this. Whether you love or hate them, it'd be really nice if Chrome on Android supported AdBlock Plus. And Apple's support for ad blockers on iOS, is definitely a shot across Google's bow that they're going to have to address. Google's ads are probably as close to the 'acceptable ads' standards as any - basically because t
Re:No such thing (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm generally fine with high level tracking that can't easily be tied to an actual person.
That said, there's no way to really audit how the dots are being connected, what's being stored, and with whom, so _practically_ speaking, I agree you pretty much do have to ban tracking in general.
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So first, malware is not 100% due to those, but a good percent.
Second...your point c is what everybody is afraid of. Enumerating it doesn't make it go away.
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That's with such reasoning like that things are unlikely to go forward.
One one side there are advertisers who seem to think that a good way to do business is to make sure that you only get ads and not what you initially came for, and the other side won't tolerate a single monetized pixel.
Yes, there are such things as acceptable ads, but it is not something that can be settled with brains switched off.
For example, are appeal to donation by charities acceptable? is self-promotion acceptable? is mentioning a f
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i disagree. i am totally fine with static banner ads and in page ads. the only reason i use adblock is to block all of the ads that do full screen popups, malware ads and video ads.
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Sure there is. I remember when Google entered the advertising business. Their whole schtick was that they only presented small text ads, well identified as such. They were fast, unobtrusive, and often useful.
Then Doubleclick bought Google for negative whateverbillionty dollars.
Re:No such thing (Score:5, Interesting)
I think most people are okay with ads. The shit that assaults your computer isn't advertising. I've been using adblock for a while now. So long that when I recently did a fresh install of Linux on an old laptop I picked up I forgot to set up adblock on Firefox. I was stunned at how aggressive ads are now. Unbelievable.
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When I show people the difference between using Internet Explorer and either Firefox or Chrome, adblocking is one of the items I mention. I then go to a common webpage we visit a lot, the Internet Movie DataBase at www.imdb.com.
In IE, there is usually a full scene behind the content area, plus ads along the right side of the content area. Then I show them the same page with FF/Chrome adblocking, and there is a nice clean website.
Even people who are just online to share email and Facebook with their families
Re:No such thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Ads are something no user wants, but every advertiser and content-hoster wants. Bottom line is ads will always be around in one form or another. And they will always be evolving and changing.
You can't get rid of them (permanently everywhere that is), and you do want some content to survive (e.g. Slashdot), so maybe an ad vetting/voting/whitelisting system has some merit.
Regarding ad voting, the potential for abuse of this is high (i.e. people hating every ad). One solution would be that your votes are always relative. In other words, do you like this ad more or less than other ads. This way some ads will always bubble to the top. And advertisers can then study/learn from those ads, and/or choose to run those ads more. And when they do that, people grow tired of those ads. So they bubble down the list and force new ads to appear.
This may not sound that great, but right now I am staring at sites that pad with screen after screen of white space, or force gigantic menus to overwrite content or display zero content when I try to ad-block them (via no JS and hosts anyway). Point is that we are already in the middle of an arms race.
People's browsers could be set for what they will allow through -- Javascript, or ad size, etc. Advertisers could pay according to how high up the ad rankings they want their ad to run -- "Top 10%", "Everyone". To reach everyone, your ad would cost more, and tend to be the best behaved.
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okay first off i aggressively block ads (i install some sort of adblock within the first 30 seconds of setting up any browser).
okay now for an ad network to be acceptable to me (and content with embedded ads acceptable to me)
1 80 percent of the content of the page should be the requested content (90% of the above the fold content should be what was requested)
2 articles should be separated into pages if and only if the content is more than will fit on a typed (reasonable font) A4 page with half inch margins
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It would be easier to find a unicorn in the wild
Re:No such thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No such thing (Score:4, Informative)
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Sure, but the vast majority of it was content linked on student homepages on University systems. Perhaps you want to go back to that - we here at Slashdot still embrace the convention. The signal to noise was damn near infinity:1 for sure. But someone was still footing the bill - in this case, tuition.
But now that anyone can get a presence online without going to a university, someone still has to pay for servers and/or bandwidth (and frankly 'time' has worth, too). Some dude blogging about cats on some $5
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You're right. Then whoever is running the web site can sell ads and put them on their web site! If a web site has more traffic than a $5/month hosting package can handle, then they can certainly afford to go out and sell advertisements. That's a fuckton of traffic.
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What do you mean "the site owner can sell ads" - you mean ad space? Because that's what we're already talking about. That's the stuff that people are blocking. I don't understand.
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I block ev
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Ahhh, now I see the disconnect. Yeah, so online ads are nothing like print media, except the concept that you're selling 'real estate' for people to get their message out.
In the beginning, online ad tracking was to prevent fraud. This is also why they're served from the ad network and not the site itself. Otherwise, It would be trivial for me to say "Oh, man.. this month I had 4 million unique impressions!" when only four people ever visited the site. Has it gone way too far? Absolutely. The Ad industry gre
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If you had something that accidentally blew up on line, then you could have picked up a phone, called a big company that did something related to what this site was about, and ask them to advertise. That's how business works. You can't expect to
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Those who want to support these web sites are free not to block their ads.
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It's called the free(ish) market. Websites that have compelling content will attract viewers who are either willing to suffer ads or fork over a usage fee or donation. Sites that don't, won't. If sites people like start dying, they'll fork over some cash to save them.
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The answer is for ads to be sufficiently inobtrusive that the majority of users don't bother blocking ads.
The fundamental issue is a tragedy of the commons. Advertisers are fighting each other for the same eyeballs with more and more intrusive and processor and network demanding ads. The web is becoming almost unusable - especially on older hardware - unless you block ads.
The reason the majority of people have installed adblockers is because they want to use the internet, not because they want to block ads,
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Well if there was no good free search engine left I may want to pay for Google. I doubt they make anything close to $5/month from me however. Probably more like a few cents.
Slashdot makes even less, even offering me to disable ads since I am a registered member.
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That's not universal. Not everyone is running a little Wordpress blog. Sometimes people have data processing requirements to provide things like stats or other experiences for a relevant audience.
I used to run a site that at its peak, was costing $1K/month to host because I was co-lo'ing a dozen servers. That's not to say it couldn't have been lower if I really needed to (I had some extra servers for testing and failover), but it still wouldn't have come close to "a few bucks a month". Cloud-based providers
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I was not running a business. You're oversimplifying again. It was a hobby that happened to fill a need in the community I served.
I still don't understand what the hell you're going on about "selling ads" - You mean buying ads for traffic to my site? I did for a while, but it was expensive and didn't give me the result I wanted - I was in a community where it was all word of mouth.
If you're talking about selling ad space, then obviously I already was. That's why I had advertisements on the site. They came f
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If you had tens of thousands of visitors a day, then it would have behooved you to sell your own ads. That means:
1. Call big company that may be interested in advertising on your web site.
2. Tell them that this many people will see an ad for them if they pay you $$ per month.
3. You write HTML (with your fingers) that say, "Buy s
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No, I don't think it's an oversimplification. If you were paying $1K/month to host, then you were running a business, which is fine. Why didn't you go sell some ads? That's a ton of money in hosting, so that's a ton of traffic. It would have made financial sense to spend some resources on selling ads, instead of taking 5 seconds to plug in some HTML from some ad network, don't you think?
What do you mean by "selling ads" (instead of using an ad network)?
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Just more reason to use ublock (Score:4, Informative)
As if not bogging your browser down with thousands of css rules every page wasn't enough.
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It is very close to the 'insurance' that the mafia sells.
I doubt that ABP threatens the ad-agencies with smashing their knees in or burning down their business, although sometimes I feel that would be an appropriate response to some of the ads I've seen.
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Is this news? (Score:2)
An anonymous reader writes with Yahoo's report that the makers of Adblock Plus are "looking to reach out to advertisers and identify an 'acceptable' level and form of advertising on the net."
Isn't this what they've been doing for months? It's how they make their money.
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Whatever happened to the micropayment idea? (Score:2)
Why didn't this concept take off?
Did it just get co-opted by Google making it relatively easy to collect micropayments for your site with mostly non-intrusive advertising?
Lack of a centralized micropayment infrastructure and some method of subscribing and collecting payments that couldn't be trivially gamed? Lack of any agreeable billing model -- ie, unlimited use subscription vs. per visit/content, inability to calculate pricing model due to volatile perception of value?
Perhaps a general user objection on
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Computationally, the overhead is kind of trivial.
If you're relying on the traditional credit card payment network then the cost overhead is high along with all the attendant accept credit card payment overhead.
But if you had a centralized micropayment service, the overhead gets down to a much lower level.
In an ideal world, such a service would be run as a non-profit (whatever skim would just go to running the service). Users would add funds to their micropayment account via normal methods to consolidate th
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Or, or... you can install uBlock and (with any luck) not see any ads.
It's a tricky one...
Professional... (Score:3, Interesting)
While I see Adblock's behaviour as *very* problematic (it's in the category "deregulated regulation", where a private entity, by its position takes the job of a regulator -- sometimes even encouraged by a state entity), without the supervision by democratic entities. Slippery and that (lots of examples come to mind, like a private entity in UK deciding that the image of a record cover is too obscene for Wikipedia, remember?)...
seeing Springer talk about "professional journalism" gives me the eeries too.
I choose to not side with any of them.
Web is Dying (Score:5, Interesting)
This is similar to having a 'better' no-no sticker (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a no-no sticker on my letterbox that prevents unadressed paper advertisments. Running adblock is like having a no-no sticker.
Adblock is now looking for a middle ground. Instead of having a no-no sticker you can have an adblock-sticker that says: some unaddressed advertisment is allowed (ie. the ones allowed by adblock). If you translate this to the paper world it could mean only ads printed on recycled paper, only single page ads; not a whole booklet, ads that are clear and concise etc.
I don't mind supporting websites I like, but I absolutely hate advertisments that take over the page, 'steal' my attention or look like content. It's a fine line and as it stands the consumer is pretty powerless to find a good middle ground. Website owners are also pretty powerless because they don't have enough control over the ads that appear on their site. It's also difficult for ad makers because there are no guidelines. Only an entity like adblock has the power to force advertisers to behave: ie. behave or be blocked.
I don't quite understand the argument of people who don't want adblock to move in this direction. If you don't like it, switch to one of the many other adblocking plugins. Im sure there will always be one adblocker-like plugin that will aim to block all ads.
I see this as a healthy development, one that could finally rid us of annoying ads while making sure content providers get compensated.
I could also see a system where adblock works with ad providers to distribute revenue. For instance, you could chose to pay adblock (or some other entity) a monthly fee that gets distributed over the content providers that you consume. Kind like Flattr or YoutubeRed, but a system that could work on any platform, from any vendor.
Provide value or go away (Score:2)
I don't mind supporting websites I like
I pay cash to websites which actually provide useful content to me. If you aren't willing to pay cash money to the website then it probably isn't worth much to you.
I don't quite understand the argument of people who don't want adblock to move in this direction. If you don't like it, switch to one of the many other adblocking plugins. Im sure there will always be one adblocker-like plugin that will aim to block all ads.
To me it is adblock selling out. They're basically offering advertisers a protection racket. I want no part of that. I don't need an ad blocker whose interests are not clearly aligned with my own. Obviously others feel the same way.
I see this as a healthy development, one that could finally rid us of annoying ads while making sure content providers get compensated.
Who says they deserve compensation? Their bad business model is not my problem. Provide value or go away.
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I pay cash to websites which actually provide useful content to me. If you aren't willing to pay cash money to the website then it probably isn't worth much to you.
If those websites are so valueless, then why bother installing AdBlock in the first place? There's three obvious possibilities:
1. You're going there on purpose, so they *do* add value to you.
2. You're going there accidentally and AdBlock protects against that. In that case, would you use a service that instead replaces sites that contain ads with a single error page, stating that the site is ad-supported, and gives you the option of paying the site, accepting the ads anyway?
3. You're evaluating whether
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Wow, that sticker thing is a great idea. I wish we had something like that here. In my city in the states, we don't get paper recycling (we can only do cardboard and bottles free), and our trash costs $5 a bag. So not only do I not have a choice about getting unsolicited bulk paper advertisements, I have to pay the city a premium to get rid of them. It blows.
Are you in Europe?
Will be like old times... (Score:2)
Looks like I'll have to get into the habit again of finding the FQDN of the sources of advertising, and setting the IP in my hosts file to 127.0.0.1, like I used to do back in the '90s.
It was a pain in the butt then, and I imagine it will be far worse now.
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professional journalism on the web? (Score:2)
Seriously, can someone name three locations, paid, or ad-supported, that offer first-hand research (not just reposts of someone else's work), unbiased/uncensored by political interest or advertiser dollars, that don't have the articles presented paragraph by paragraph, each on its own page, and that do NOT present a danger to the security of platforms?
AdBlockerBlocker (Score:2)
I guess there's a new niche in the market now - the AdBlocker Blocker...
Adblock Minus (Score:4, Interesting)
Once upon a time ads annoyed me, I chose Adblock PLus because it got rid of the annoying ads.
Adblock Plus stopped doing a great job at blocking annoying ads and has then been uninstalled and everyone moved on...
Adblock Plus now wants to make it's inferior product worse to make a buck.
*looks at Ublock Origin icon and laughs*
Stinks like a protection scam... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's some nice advertising you've got there... It'd be a shame if someone decided to block it...
But seriously, okay... you pay off ABP. A large group of users migrate to another ad-block tool... that tool's creator demands protection money... and so on. That, to me, is why it sounds so scummy -- because ABP can only promise not to block for it's own user-base. It's literally, "hey, give us a cut of your ad-revenue or we'll give a free app to people to prevent you from serving ads."
Does this policy undermine their "acceptable ads" option? i.e. ads are now acceptable if they meet a certain technical criteria or the provider has paid protection money?
Hahaha.
Barriers to entry? (Score:2)
I have used uBlock and find slightly better results than with adblock but certainly the barriers to entry for adblockers can't be very high. Completey stupid if adblock sells out.
Semantics (Score:5, Interesting)
Racketeering is good semantics for their current business model indeed, as there is no supervision whatsoever right now. Like Bild (end everybody else) I also don't think Eyeo is doing this in a "transparent enough" way that there's no doubt they aren't enforcing an "advertising fee" in their "controlled space of the web" (i.e. everyone who uses their adblock, their only de facto product). It should be clear enough for users of adblock, and for "payers" of whitelisting what this money is for, and a clear description of what "work" it entails to whitelist some ad (and/or an entire website/domain).
If it is to be done right, Eyeo needs to disclose publicly it offers two products: AdBlock - a free piece of software that has no direct form of revenue; and "Verified Whitelisting", a service that consists solely on periodic validation of conformity (with their "sensible ads" paradigm) for each company that so requests.
Eyeo then needs to bill each company transparently for the actual work hours taken to verify the requested pages (including hours wasted in scenarios that involve telling the company some site does not conform due to reason XYZ). But most importantly, these billed hours need to be made public. Only through transparency can companies AND users be assured that Eyeo is doing what it publicizes it does (only validate "sensible ads", and not any ads by highly-profitable payers). This way, the practice starts entering legal ground. It's pretty much a process like legalizing weed - the state can be sure there's no trafficking because all business go through their supervision, but mostly just the fact it is due to go through state supervision is enough to stop abuse. Give supervision power to every user of adblock, and Eyeo is sure to do most of its business in the way they publicize, without actually making more money than they should be doing for such an easy job.
And most important of all - AdBlock development costs cannot overlap with the whitelisting paradigm costs. This final detail is what separates racketeering from the legal practice of creating this "sensible ads" paradigm and its validation process.
Disclaimer: this is my opinion. I am no Law expert, but to me - as a citizen and user of adblock - this is what makes me comfortable. I will stop using adblock as soon as I see abuse in this whitelisting process in clear form. But I am not a company paying for whitelisting, so I don't get their side of the picture as well as I should.
Not a problem (Score:2)
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Or just use uBlock Origin, which doesn't play this bullshit game.
Compromise (Score:2)
On what is acceptable (Score:3)
"An 'acceptable' level and form of advertising on the net"
When we are forced to start this conversation by pleading "Would you stop allowing my computers to be infected with viruses, with ransomware and trojans and stuff? Please, please, would you stop subjecting my computer to severe risk of infection? Please don't subject me to this." then it's very telling. IYAM it says that the Internet advertising industry cannot regain any sort of trust with us for a very long time. That they have to completely scrap every method they're using, every business practice and start again, from the ground up. They have lost their way so very badly that there *are* no directions back to the path. Their only choice can be to abandon their journey. Go home, and start again. Back from square one.
Only then can we even discuss other, very important facts, like stealing the bandwidth and CPU we pay for, tracking our every online habit without our permission and intruding on our private life.
The #1 that makes ads "unacceptable" in my book... (Score:3)
No ad that is capable of infecting my system with malware or otherwise installing any software on my computer without my permission can ever be considered acceptable.
If the likes of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook etc etc can 100% gaurantee that their advertising will NEVER install something malicious (or contribute in some way to the installation of something malicious) even if their ad networks are hacked by rogue hackers or otherwise compromised, I will consider unblocking those networks.
Christmas in July (Score:2)
How to both have a little fun and show how over-inundated the ads are:
Go to your spouse's computer in say, July. Do a google search on Christmas decorations and click on 10 ads for Christmas stuff. Log off and walk away.
Your spouse will be flooded with Christmas ads for the rest of the month, on most sites that they visit.
I did this to my wife once as a joke and it was a good time. But it does show how deeply the tracking is inserted into everything.
I don't mind some tracking. I do mind others. I do no
Neville Chamberlain (Score:2)
Negotiating "peace for our time."
Charge them in the USA with RICO violations (Score:2)
"Big websites can pay a fee not to be blocked. And it is these proceeds that finance the Cologne-based company and its 49-strong workforce."
Pay up or be blocked - sounds like a RICO violation right there. I bet some legal fuckery could be twisted out of one of our treaties to make it happen.
Forget about adblock plus (Score:2)
Do you know this sedo parking sites? This phishing sites, which try to put many keywords from the legitimate domain on a typo domain? These sites were the first on the whitelist for acceptable ads. Since then ABP is dead for me.
Re: Money talks (Score:2)
The good news is, there are many more where they came from and if they no longer provide the service their users want we can use a different service.
Re: Money talks (Score:4, Informative)
ABP jumped the shark a long time ago. The plugin to use now is uBlock origin. It's lighter than ABP, blocks ads and analytics and so on and it has a lot of other nice features. One of my favorites is the way that it not only blocks things like GoogleTags and Google Analytics, it also inserts a javascript shim that replicates their API with noops. This way, poorly written sites that rely on javascript won't break when the expected object/method isn't there. It also fools a lot of Adblock detectors.
Links:
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en
FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
Source: https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/ublock
Re: (Score:2)
They really be more open on how much donations they are getting and how much the hosting actually costs. I really cannot support such projects that have vague donation'o'meter and I really can't judge if my money is spent running the infrastucture or to buy beers for the developers (which is just fine as long as I am told that part of my money is used this way).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You don't have to. Quote from: github.com/gorhill/uBlock
BEWARE! uBlock Origin is COMPLETELY UNRELATED to the web site ublock.org
The donations sought by the individual behind ublock.org are not benefiting any of those who contributed most to create uBlock Origin (developers, translators, and all those who put efforts in opening detailed issues). For the differences in features between uBlock Origin and uBlock, you are more likely than anywhere else to find an unbiased explanation in this Wikipedia article.
Re: (Score:2)
One reason I still recommend Adblock Plus for non-technical users is that it is branded consistently and works across all major web browsers. It's much easier to train users that they should have a little red Stop Sign with an ABP in it regardless of their web browser than it is to explain that they need multiple products across IE, Chrome, Firefox and their mobile devices.
Also, while in my view there are no acceptable ads and I preach zero tolerance for advertising, some of my customers are more sensitive
Re: (Score:2)
Not actually shilling. Sorry.
Re: (Score:3)
I wonder how much they pay for hosting? You can get 4-8 core servers with 16GB RAM and 1-2TB storage with 100Mbps unlimited traffic from OVH for under 30euro/month. And often their Atom servers are just fine and are under 10euro/month with same 100Mbps unlimited traffic.
Re: (Score:2)
> People wouldn't pay for your service? Then it is by definition worthless for some.
FTFY. While I don't disagree ads are of limited (zero) value, the price == value is a fallacy.
1. The *same* service/thing can and does have *different* value to many people.
2. Ergo, not *everyone* is a customer. To the people who _don't_ use it, the service is worthless. To the people who _do_ use it, it has value.
Re: (Score:2)
So people won't mind then if they get refused access to free services on websites who sustain themselves with ads if the user has an ad-blocker installed?
They are free to block those with ad-blockers. We are free to block their ad-blocking detection algorithm and/or decide to switch another web site.
Oh and just out of curiosity, If the service is useless because you aren't prepared to pay for it why are you using it?
It may be worth 1/month (which is close to worthless). If they charge $1/month for it, I will not use it.
Re: (Score:2)
Just set your useragent to googlebot. Very few sites will block googlebot, even with adblocking or sometimes their paywall. This is perfectly legitimate -- if it's not free they shouldn't pretend it is on google to draw people in just to block them until they pay up.