I've no real objections to advertising online, so for a long time I didn't use an ad blocker. However, in the last two or three years some adverts on sites which I visit often have been becoming increasingly offensive. Flashing animated images, pictures of the inside of people's mouths, and semi-pornographic ads are something which degrades my web viewing experience and if a technical solution to this problem exists then I have no hesitation about using it. For the foreseeable future it seems that ad blocking will remain necessary.
Perhaps the solution is some sort of code of conduct for advertisers. If ads are discreet and respectful of the viewer then I'd certainly be prepared to stop blocking them.
Yeah, I'm curious what the culture of Evony users are like, since it seems that they're attracting one sort of customer (horny men) and then providing a completely different product (fantasy computer game). Is the game world filled w/ a lot of adult role players or something?
If ads are discreet and respectful of the viewer then I'd certainly be prepared to stop blocking them.
I can only speak for myself but a solution does not seem that far off (at least not to get me to see your ads). While I agree that some sort of code of conduct may be a good idea, I don't really see it working out in the long run what with everyone always being willing to sacrifice good will for a quick buck.
That said, I use NoScript in Firefox and I run it for other reasons than blocking advertisements and I don't have an ad-blocker installed. If I white list a website it means I made a deliberate choice to trust whatever it is going to throw at me. The most important thing here is that I did not allow any third party to serve me some random code (plain markup is fine). I have no way of telling whether the site I just white listed in fact knows what their external advertisers actually serve. And this is proven again and again by how site owners expect visitors to contact the site when they see an ad that is intrusive so that they can "nuke it". This to me makes it a no deal.
To kill two birds with one stone: Serve your advertisements from your own servers and if I want to read your content I have to make a choice whether to trust you and your webserver(s). If you violate my trust then I will go elsewhere and I am no longer a waste of your resources and you are not a waste of mine.
If I have for some reason decided to not let you run dynamic content on whatever device I am currently on you simply have to respect that or I leave. You still have the opportunity to serve me static ads, surely that's got to be worth something. You don't know my reasons for not white listing you (as this article states as well). What surprised me about this link was that I did not see a single advertisement on the page. This means they are all using JavaScript or Flash. Sorry, your loss. And eventually my loss as well since the website might not live to see another day due to lack of income.
Incidentally, easy white listing [of script execution] for sites is also the only thing stopping me from switching to Chrome today.
Well said, that's exactly the problem. They aren't asking us to unblock their ads, they are asking us to unblock our third party cookies in the browser and in Flash. That's just not going to fly. It's the third party cookies that are precisely the problem with unblocking Flash.
Adobe has abused our trust with a third party cookie blocking mechanism that just doesn't protect us without essentially making Flash worthless on many sites where we do want to use it. One of the few ways around it is to use NoScript to block JavaScript driving Flash by default, and then allow the ones we want to allow one by one. But why would I allow an ad network to track me across web sites just because I like Ars Technica?
So asking us to unblock Flash? Wow, I love arstechnica, but they know better than asking us to do that.
We are being asked to accept a particular type of ad technology that is fraught with problems, it's not ads we're blocking, it's widely abused technology that we're blocking. It's not for the pretty animations that Flash is used in many ads, it's for the third party cookies that track across sites.
Most people don't even realize how those Flash third party cookies track their movements across the net. But Ars Technica realizes, and so do I. Hell no!
"Serve your advertisements from your own servers and if I want to read your content I have to make a choice whether to trust you and your webserver(s)."
Unfortunately, the advertiser then has to trust the publisher on how many users visited the site (or come up with something less intrusive that counts views).
No, the advertisers in radio and tv are in the same boat as the stations themselves... no one really knows how many people really saw/heard an ad. They just both choose to trust a third party (neilson/arbitron) to give them the ratings. It just isn't possible to know for sure how many people saw an ad from a broadcast. Cable/sat and DVRs make it a bit easier, but only a bit.
On the web though, it's ridiculously easy to verify each request that there is no need for the trusted third party.
I deleted my AdBlock Plus easy list entry and started only manually blocking irritating ads.
It turns out that only about 20 rules covered 99.5% of the _really_ annoying ads, whilst still leaving the OK ones. Adding those rules wasn't difficult, or annoying, or time consuming - just click and block when irritated.
The nuclear option (easy list) gets everything - even ad words - despite the fact that I don't mind them very much. The ABP developers really shouldn't make that the default, because I don't think people realize what they are signing up to. I don't object to them having the option, but it shouldn't be the default.
Agreed. Text-based ads are fine with me, as are non-animated ads that roughly blend into a site's color scheme. If the ad animates, flashes, moves, makes sound, tracks me with cookies, etc. then I want it blocked. However, I don't have time to manually unblock all the unoffensive ads after installing EasyList, or block all the offensive ones instead of using EasyList. Another default subscription option that blocks the most offensive ads would be most welcome.
Advertisers are in an 'arms race' with users. Users become less likely to click on ads over time. Website owners have to increase the percentage of the first visible page over time to maintain the same income from ads. Adverts also become more visually distracting over time for the same reasons.
Witness Adsense, which started off with text only, but now has full flash capabilities.
What is the solution to the problem? I don't think there is one.
Perhaps the rise of the paid app will provide a way to reduce ads, just like cable tv has done, but this will only be a niche. (I'm speculating there.)
Well then don't go to the sites with ads you do not like. Just close your browser, or press the back button the moment you see an ad that disgusts you. And then don't go to that site again.
The way I see it, there is an implied contract between a website and a viewer. The website says, "well you get to look at my content for free and you will not have to pay for all the work I have done creating the content and serving it to you, but in exchange you should see and consider the various advertisements and deals we are offering."
Again you do not have to use the website, but if you do you should not block the ads.
The solution, (IMHO) is don't visit those sites any more. Vote with your feet.
Ad blocking means the market will never correct itself. You're cutting off the feedback loop.
If an ad annoys you, just don't visit that website again! Simple. It's not like there's a shortage of websites to visit.
edit: Yeah downmod me. It's a crazy idea! If you go into a shop, and the owner beats you with a bat, you'd resolve to wear full body armor when shopping from now on, and go right back there wouldn't you.
The vast majority of sites that I visit, I visit from aggregators such as HN, from Google, or from 3rd-party links in my Twitter stream or RSS reader. I don't have any numbers, but I would imagine that nowadays that's how a large number of people consume their content. When you say "don't visit these sites anymore", how exactly am I supposed to keep track of who I can and can't visit for fear of offending?
If there's an article on here from nytimes, I just don't bother with it any more. They have a paywall/subscription thingy and I just can't be bothered to google for login details.
But it's fairly simple to just block sites that annoy you - firewall/hosts/etc
"Ad blocking means the market will never correct itself. You're cutting off the feedback loop.
If an ad annoys you, just don't visit that website again! Simple. It's not like there's a shortage of websites to visit."
Doesn't this depend on how ad blockers work?
If my browser fetches some HTML, and it includes an img ref to some ad site, my blocker might a) prevent the fetching of that resource, or b) allow it to be fetched, but block the rendering.
I'm pretty sure blockers use the first technique. So, visiting a site with an ad blocker ups a site's hit count, but adds nothing to the eyeball count for the ads. Fro the ad-tracking POV, it's as if you never visited.
It may very well be the sort of feedback that's needed.
If you really want to be more active about this you're better off writing to the site owner with your concerns than simply not visiting the place.
If my site gets no traffic, how will I know if it's because of the ads, or crappy content?
I won't use an ad-blocker as I think advertising is legitimate, and provides support for many great sites and potential for important startups.
I do use flashblock/click to flash (which has the side effect of hiding the most offensive video ads). But any site that becomes unbearable with ads, I move on, and don't go there again. I would suggest it is time to avoid those sites.
"Blocking ads indiscriminately by using a provided block list isn't."
Can you explain why not?
Unless there's some explicit prior agreement, I have no obligation to use my resources to render something in some specific manner, or at all.
Online ads fall into the same technological mismatch as online music. It's the application of solid-to-the-touch thinking to a fluid digital medium.
Web pages are not print. Don't base your business model on a different medium. (Ask the RIAA how well that works out.)
My browser requests some HTML; what it does with it on my end is up to me. If I don't want to waste time and resources making additional requests for other content, that's my business. If I don't want to render everything specified in the HTML, that's my choice. If I want to skip elements, apply custom CSS, block scripts, all are my choices.
"By that same logic Ars Technica are allowed to detect if you have blocked their ad and not deliver you the content you requested."
Absolutely! It's my choice what I will render on my machine, and it's the server's choice what it will send me when I make a particular request. If they are capable of detecting when I've blocked ads and choose to deny my request for the content, that's well within their rights.
I actually wonder if they would do this. It's technically possible, but it is really a 'nuclear option' for a website.
Then again, Ars is one of the few sites that will actively ban your account if you use ad blocking. But so far, I think they've only removed accounts for comments/forums, not the whole shebang.
If you enjoy something but you circumvent the methods by which the producer earns a living, you're making it less likely that the things you enjoy will continue to be produced. You may not see that as unethical, but at the very least, it's unreasonable.
That's what I do, but it's enough of a hassle that I'm not far from going to a full block list. The main problem is that, perhaps on purpose, ad networks use pretty random URLs that make it hard to block particular ads. If, say, Evony ads all included the string "evony" in the URL, it'd be a lot easier to selectively block them.
2) When an ad annoys you, enable your ad blocker for that site.
3) If you actually enjoy the content the site provides, you should let them know why you're blocking their ads so they can fix the problem. Otherwise, if everyone does what you do, the site will cease to exist.
"Right-click on a banner and choose “Adblock” from the context menu — the banner won’t be downloaded again. Maybe even replace parts of the banner address with star symbols to block similar banners as well."
The AdBlockPlus documentation explains how to limit specific rules to certain sites. (EDIT: http://adblockplus.org/en/filters#elemhide_domains) If you get filters from someone else, you're probably blocking ads that don't bother you on sites you enjoy, which sounds counterproductive to me.
Doubleclick doesn't allow proxied ad distribution, and I'm not sure a similar effect could be achieved through DNS.
The Ars thread touches on this, where Kurt mentions that Doubleclick's ad deployment isn't smart enough to detect flash-blockers and serve a static ad, and Ars isn't permitted to replace Doubleclick's deployment code.
Host your own ads, that way they won't be in my ad-blocker's blacklist. If your adds become annoying, then they go in the blacklist.
I'm wondering if, between ad-blocking and tivo, separate ads and commercials will be going away soon. I'm perfectly OK with the judges of American Idol with Coke glasses on their desk, or a sentence at the bottom of a blog post: "This post brought to you by FizzBuzz.com". I also don't mind the ads at the front of some podcasts, spoken by the same people that narrate the podcast itself. http://ruby5.envylabs.com/ is a good example of advertising that I don't mind one bit. Similar to how old radio shows were "sponsored", and the sponsor got a mention a few times throughout the show.
When it comes to ads online, though, isn't the right cliché "the cat's out of the bag?" For years before ad-blocking became widespread, the more tech-savvy users complained and warned that the more aggressive ads became, what with popups/unders, talking ads, etc., the more likely they would be blocked. (I seem to remember we were poo-pooed by the marketers saying that "real users don't care," though this may be a nerd-chip-on-shoulder revisionist memory.) But, here we are.
It's unfortunate that there's the collateral damage that affects non-obnoxious sites; and, while I whitelist the sites I frequent, and many here may as well, I'm sure we're the minority.
That being said, here's about as close to a real-world analogue for my thoughts as I can get: in NYC, I'm sure there are people in Times Square trying to gain signups for Greenpeace and other "ethical" purposes mixed in with the other people hustling CDs, comedy club tickets, and the like, but I just ignore everyone as I walk by, wholesale, because stopping and seeing what everyone's about will turn a brief walk into a pain in the ass.
I'm not sure what the answer is; perhaps the various adblocking technologies could make whitelisting a site even more obvious? With AdBlock Plus, you hit the drop-down and choose Disable on foobar.com, but it requires an active interaction to seek that out. GlimmerBlocker for the Mac is even more buried (as it's a proxy, it's in System Preferences.) Maybe switching to putting placeholders where the ads would be with a short message and a single click to whitelist would make it a little easier for users to both see how many ads a site's pushing as well as whitelist the site with the minimum amount of effort? I donno.
A better phrase, especially in connotation, might be "the well has already been poisoned". After abusive ads have prompted you to install an ad-blocker you're not likely to look back. Nor are you likely to have sympathy for a site like Ars Technica that admits they serve abusive ads ("sometimes we have to accept those ads").
I'm not sure sympathy is an effective business model. If the ads are annoying enough to make lots of people block them, maybe there's something wrong with the ads, not the people.
If you install adblock "Fingers in ears" (ignore everything), you're not even giving websites a chance. You're not even giving them the benefit of the doubt that they could ever provide you useful advertising. You're assuming they're going to annoy you, so you're sticking your fingers in your ears.
You can sort of see why that's disheartening to people who are trying to provide useful advertising.
I personally think installing adblock is a crappy move. It's like walking into a conference with hands over your ears incase someone tries to sell you something. You just look like an idiot, and lose out.
It's sort of common courtesy to not assume someone is going to irritate you when you meet them. That's why, when we meet new people, we don't cover our ears, we extend them goodwill, and assume they're going to be nice.
Sadly, adblock users (Ones who block everything) don't seem to have any common courtesy.
It's more like trusting your secretary to do a good job of screen useless calls. You outsource the screening to an list provider rather than making a decision for every site on the internet.
if (youDontLikeAdsOnWebsite()) {
dontFlippingGoThereThen();
}
If you went to the mall, and a shopkeeper in Macys started beating you over the head with a bat, would you come back next week to the mall and go into every shop in full body armor, or would you just not go in Macys any more?
As usual with these things, the analogies are a bit lacking. I humbly suggest that it's more like requesting a catalog from Macys and then ignoring/defacing/destroying the parts of the catalog that I am not interested in.
if (youDontLikeMyBlcokingAds()) {
dontFlippingServeMeAnyContentAtAllWhenIMakeAnHttpRequest();
}
That's certainly an option, and I'd expect we'd see a move to that if adblock usage ever did increase to more than 0.5% or whatever it is at the moment.
We'd just have a free internet for those not running adblock, and a paywall internet for those using adblock.
Exactly. There is a major opportunity lurking here. Online ads suck, actually ads in general suck, but how does one fix them? Sounds like a good challenge.
A small number of boutique advertising networks have successfully tackled this challenge and are making quite a lot for their trouble.
For instance, The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/): 30 ad spots per month, currently $7,900/ad, equals $237,000/mo (and they're always booked solid.) This doesn't even count their "roadblock" ads which are an additional $7,900/day. The best part about their ads are they're good. I've found quite a few excellent products through them over the years.
That's like wishing for all cars to be as good as Porsches. While I share your sentiment, The Deck is high-end advertising for a small batch of high-end advertisers.. people won't/can't/don't want to pay those rates everywhere.
I doubt it's possible to fix. Advertising is by its nature an attempt to manipulate people, by grabbing their attention, bombarding them with information, and eliciting emotional responses in them. Unsolicited advertisement is inherently disrespectful to the people being advertised at. There's no way to do it nicely, you can only hope people are too apathetic to complain about it.
Advertising is about moving product. Just a quick perusal of advertising techniques indicates that just "providing information" is a rarely used methodology. Biased information isn't very useful anyhow.
Indeed. Putting a scantily-clad lady up on the TV screen isn't giving me any information. It's treating me like an animal, hoping my sex drive overrides the part of my brain that says "You don't really need to buy this crap".
Loud noises, cute kittens, catchy songs, scary consequences, status symbols, repetition until you can't forget the company's name if you tried. That's not any information I need.
I remember a few years back when everyone was asking this questions and then we got Adwords and Adsense. Those worked great for a while, then we ended up almost back to where we started. It'll be interesting to see how thing go this time around.
Hmm, if you mean people opposing the very concept of advertising, then I agree, most people don't. But I hear complaints about the increasingly offensive/intrusive nature of online ads in particular from pretty much everyone I know, including elderly relatives. I think a lot more people would use AdBlock if they knew it existed / knew how to install it.
I think people realize exactly what they're blocking.
You install something called AdBlock Plus. As suggested in its name, you probably want to block ads. Which ads? All ads. Maybe people think of "That one annoying ad" that was the last straw that made them seek out the blocker, but I don't think most people think in terms of individual ads that they find okay or not okay.
The most important thing to sustain an ad-supported business model, above and beyond anything else, is the quality of the ads. Ads that pay well but drive your userbase to block them or leave will no longer pay when the impressions drop, but ads that look nice, aren't intrusive, and are relevant to your audience will keep people coming back.
Look at sites on The Deck's network. They each have one ad, targeted to creative and tech professionals. The ads tend to look more like something the Iconfactory would put together than the average "1 rule 2 a flat belly" dreck. They give both the site and the ad an ethos of premium quality.
For sufficiently small values of "many". I don't think that's a very common practice, and those are the people who are treating the sites they enjoy unfairly.
Well, if websites stop serving their ads via centralized servers tracking my every move across the web, I might consider not blocking them anymore (provided they're not animated and/or huge).
If you don't like it, don't consume the resources of the site serving the adds. This idea that your entitled to the content, without actually 'paying' for it (you pay by giving up a bit of privacy to heighten the value of the ads) is just wrong in my world view.
It's not stealing. It's not piracy. It's just the wrong thing to do.
Given that they are in fact exchanging his privacy for money, I'm not sure your assertion holds... perhaps the poster is being over-dramatic about it, but I don't see how they're not selling privacy to some extent.
Selling people's privacy is part of an ad company's revenue stream. Ad networks pay sites to post ads. Sites make money, in part, from selling their user's privacy.
One can quibble whether or not this is a big deal, but I don't think one can say it simply doesn't happen.
It doesn't really happen though; to sell privacy you have to remove a portion of it to sell.
Now we can argue the semantics of whether the act of visiting a website is considered private knowledge. I'd argue not - it's like walking into a shop, the shop has the right to say "hey you know who was here earlier?". But at the end of the day "they are selling my privacy" is over dramatizing what is happening. By visiting any website you run the risk - how do you know they are not selling the IP logs directly etc.
Visiting websites is just, within reason, public knowledge.
I also wonder how many advertisers actually use the data to target ads - and how much of it is used simply for numbers tracking (I dont know either way but it would be interested to see). I mention this because, when I run w/o ad blockers I don't really see anything actively targeted at me.
This incessant use of the word "privacy" in contexts where it doesn't really apply frustrates me: because it dumbs down situations where privacy is actually affected.
The point is not a single visit to a single site. When you have a large ad network advertising all across the web, they are serving you ads on all kinds of sites. A big enough ad provider (think doubleclick or google) gets to see every site you visit and what order you visit them in. They know what times and what days you browse. If that's not an invasion of privacy, then it's at least akin to stalking.
Regardless of what you call it I'm not comfortable with it, and I'm not going to disable my ad blocker any time soon. The only reason I even went to ars technica was to read this article; I'll be happy to not return.
In fact there is an entire sub-industry of behavioral targeting information brokers out there, reselling your history to ad networks who don't have enough data about you in their own logs.
Just because it's technically feasible doesn't make it right. Consuming resources without contributing anything back makes you a leech, nothing more. That the internet is involved is merely semantics.
A lot of people don't think it's wrong. Ars politely asking has apparently persuaded some people that using an ad blocker is wrong. People caring about whether you are making money comes after you've established a relationship with them, not before. More will continue using an ad blocker I'm sure, despite Ars' entreaties. The problem is the people that don't love sites like Ars.
I suspect part of the problem is for sites like this is that when your top story for the week is the new Ubuntu colour-scheme, then your users probably are not going to pay for your information and analysis.
p.s. For the avoidance of doubt this comment is free to view and unencumbered.
A lot of people running premium/freemium sites compete in some capacity for advertising space on totally free, advertising-funded sites. More user blocking of major advertising networks means lower prices for advertisers who place directly. It also deals a blow to parasitic SEO sites that do nothing but serve out adverts, taking up space in SERPs that would otherwise go to actual content providers. Huzzah!
No, this is precisely how we can force them to rethink their approach. I don't want Google to know my every move on the net. Its that simple. Beyond that, I couldn't care less if someone wants to stick useless bits on their content to make money; I generally ignore it.
I'm sure Google mines everything they can get their hands on, but without third-party cookies, they can no longer identify you as uniquely. For all they know, it could be 1 or 100 people behind that NAT IP address.
Also if you're using whitelists, they will only track you on the sites that you're choosing to whitelist, so it's not as if whitelisting Ars will immediately allow them to track all your moments.
Neither of these are perfect solutions to your concerns, but I thought they should at least be mentioned.
This is considered a valuable comment? A site is telling its readers that their actions are hurting its ability to produce content they enjoy. Believing that they should find a different source of income is a perfectly valid position, but if you just don't care that content you enjoy might stop being produced, as your comment suggests, then you're unreasonable.
The argument here is that even if the user never would have responded to any of the ads anyway, the website loses money when users don't view the ads. I call bullshit.
An advertiser is going to pay as much for ads as they can profit from them. At the end of the day, the advertiser wants to spend less on ads than they make in profit from running those ads - they don't care about # impressions, # clicks, or whatever. If an advertiser can make $1.01 profit for every 1,000 random ad impressions, they'll pay $1 or less for those 1,000 impressions. If I can identify half my audience that will never respond to the ad, I'm essentially making $1 for 500 impressions instead of 1,000. I'll happily pay $2 for 1,000 of those more effective impressions.
I don't care if you get paid CPM, CPC, or CPA. You aren't making money of the users who don't respond to the ads.
As someone who works on a site largely funded through banner advertising, I can confirm that this is true; CPM is tied directly to CTR. A higher CTR means not only a higher CPM but also higher quality ads, so it is in everyone's best interest to not show ads to users who won't click on them.
The question then, for a for-profit site, how do you monetize the freeloaders? I thing the answer is:
1. Try to get them to upgrade to a paid subscription.
2. Create highly targeted ads based on the content, and integrate them with that content (ie not from ad servers). Unfortunately, this is only a cost-effective option if you get a high volume of traffic).
3. Restrict freeloaders from using your most expensive resources. I don't imagine a site like Ars is very bandwidth intensive, but if an adblocking user is costing them a lot in bandwidth for some reason, they could provide the content without the images, for example.
Sites also should consider how important it is to monetize every user directly. How much of your cost is fixed vs goes up per user? If most of your costs are fixed (paying writers for editorial content, for example) and the cost of providing content to users is low, it may be better to try to maximize readers aven if some of those are freeloaders; users talk and share information and links, so user A with adblock installed, whose visits cost you almost nothing, might result in users B, C and D who don't have adblock installed visiting your site.
My thought exactly. The difference here is analagous to the difference between a late night show and an "industry" show. Take Jon Stewart as the first. Nobody in the world has any reason to want his show out there every night because he is not generating any sales. He is also not charging for his show. Thus his show is artificially coupled with ads to support it. This us an unnatural relationship and in order to compensate, he has to be really good to get really high ratings.
On the other hand take Martha Stewart. A number of industries such as cutlery makers, wineries, home decorators, etc. are benefitting from her show airing. She can be sponsored by any company in any industry and never has to mention them once since she is already bringing them sales. Another example of this are home improvement shows -the directly benefit Lowes and Home Depot.
Until recently, I refused to use adblock on principle, because I wanted to support ad-supported websites, even if I didn't like the ads.
Then PDF and flash player exploits started showing up in ads on high-traffic websites. After a couple close calls (only averted thanks to my particular system configuration), I installed AdBlock and FlashBlock. I blacklist both ads and flash content by default.
Websites I can trust to serve me ads that aren't going to try and root my machine get whitelisted so that all their content shows up. All ads based on Project Wonderful fall into this category, since they only serve text and images. Google Ads would have also fallen into this category, but they're not safe anymore since I've seen them serving up Flash.
I'm perfectly happy with sites not liking my approach. They can show me a message asking me to turn off my ad-blocker (and I might, if I'm willing to give them a chance and I'm interested in their content), or refuse to serve me content entirely. That's fine.
If content providers are upset with the current state of things, maybe they should think about how we got here: ad networks are, in general, a wild west in which you serve up unknown advertisements to your visitors without any knowledge of its content. Content providers that care about their customers tend to block any advertisements they get complaints about - which is great - but by using ad networks that run on a 'blacklist only' system, they're knowingly putting their visitors at risk in order to generate ad revenue. By the time a flash exploit makes it onto your advertisement blacklist, your customers have already been hurt.
I definitely get a degraded experience from blocking ads. Missing content (e.g. images) and broken layout, and time spent having to work out how to block ads. But it's better than flashing pictures in the corner of the screen.
Absolutely. I've heard talk of some sites degrading entirely for users who are using adBlock.
I would expect that to be met with a pretty harsh backlash, though. Even though it's a small minority of people who use adBlock, they are a vocal and persuasive minority.
"I would expect that to be met with a pretty harsh backlash, though. Even though it's a small minority of people who use adBlock, they are a vocal and persuasive minority."
So this group decides to block ads and when the content producers decide to degrade their content (which is their right), they get pissed?
It sounds like a bunch of entitled kids. It reminds me of an article I read recently about the new generation of kids...
It seems perfectly fair to me on all sides. It's the user's right to modify their browser to load/display only portions of content on their computer if they want; it's website providers' right to display users different content if they do so; and it's the users' right to avoid visiting and linking to the website if they do that.
All sides come out having some reasonable points and some entitled-kids feeling IMO. In particular, the "wahh, my ads were blocked" websites sound a lot like the RIAA at times (though Ars avoids most of the more annoying rhetoric), attempting to blame someone else for the fact that their business model no longer works, instead of finding a new business model.
"All sides come out having some reasonable points and some entitled-kids feeling IMO. In particular, the "wahh, my ads were blocked" websites sound a lot like the RIAA at times"
eventually, people will be saying "wahh..why do I have to pay for my favorite site..it used to be free".
My problem isn't that ads are blocked. If you want to block a site's ads, this is fine. However, these adblockers are blocking ads on pretty much every site that uses them. Many ads are getting blocked on sites that the user has never even seen. How do you know that they are intrusive if you have never even seen the ads?
"(though Ars avoids most of the more annoying rhetoric), attempting to blame someone else for the fact that their business model no longer works, instead of finding a new business model."
If the majority if users coming to their site are using an adblocker, and they make their money on ads, it's the adblocker that is preventing them from making money, not the model. You may say that those people wouldn't have clicked on those ads, but many people I know installed an adblocker in their friends/family members computers. Those people don't even know that there are ads on many of the sites where they are blocked. If this trend continues,advertising will no longer be profitable, not because it doesn't work, but because it's being blocked.
That's pretty much what this article is about. ArsTechnica experimented with blocking their content to those using AdBlock, and this post is in response to the backlash.
The problem with this is that in reality you will be missing the "ShowDonationOptions();" and the "offerDegradedExperience();" will be "offerNoExperience();". Plus, adblockers will likely find a way around "user.usingAdBlock()". Ultimately, you can't force someone to consume your propaganda unless you physically restrain them and pin their eyes open.
"Does that mean that there are the occasional intrusive ads, expanding this way and that? Yes, sometimes we have to accept those ads."
Then I'm going to run an ad blocker. I visit how many sites a day? What percent at any given time are in their "sometimes" phase?
You run annoying ads, I get annoyed, I do what I can to stop being annoyed. Don't run annoying ads, I don't get annoyed, I don't take action to avoid the thing that isn't annoying me. Done.
The fact that you picked a business model that relies on me being willing to be annoyed isn't my problem. Stop serving me content if it bothers you so much - I'll survive, I promise.
I have many ad servers blocked at DNS mostly because of cross-domain tracking. Browsers (by default) allow third-party cookies, and while I don't mind if a site runs ads, I do think cross-site tracking and profiling has to be more controllable by users.
The firefox extension "requestpolicy" http://www.requestpolicy.com/ is a fascinating view of the web. It's too strict to use every day, but is much more an "opt-in" view that everyone should try for a day.
I use RequestPolicy every day. I'm amazed that no browser provides this functionality built-in. Blocking all third party resources by default offers some strong protection against XSS and tracking sites. That it blocks ads and causes pages to render more spartanly is merely a bonus and exposes poor designs. Since everything that's blocked is accessible with the click of a button, I don't find it that inconvenient. I just wish more sites would serve all of their content from within their domain (including ads).
I don't actively use AdBlock anymore. I keep it installed just in case I need it but it's usually disabled. Banner/text ads don't bother me. I don't even notice them. Click2Flash is my preferred weapon of choice. I have no guilt blocking Flash ads. They're annoying, invasive, and make my browser slow. Just not willing to make that sacrifice.
"We made the mistake of assuming that everyone who is blocking ads at Ars is doing so with malice."
How'd they do that? Ads are annoying, and many people I know never click on internet ads. For us (perhaps a minority, I don't know) ad-blocking leads to a better internet. We're probably the ones referred to in the article who are happy to help a website out if they ask for it in another way.
On a different note: Maybe car windshields could someday block billboards...
Ads are annoying, and many people I know never click on internet ads.
Addressed at the start of the second paragraph:
"There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis."
But doesn't that reflect a broken model then? If you really and truly never click on ads, what value does the advertiser get from the view (vs a click)?
I consider attempts to subvert my unconscious mind to be the human equivalent of privilege escalation exploits - they are malicious hacks, I have no tolerance and no sympathy for them.
Branding. Ars Technica is respected among a certain subset of the population and IBM, ScienceNews and GQ want their products associated with that brand.
There's far more to marketing than just informing customers about your products.
What we need is some sort of voluntary rating system for ads. Tag the massively annoying (sounds, movement etc) or horribly disgusting (rotting teeth etc) ones as such and I'll happily use adblock software that only blocks those. It could kind of work, there'd need to be a way to block adnets/sites that lie about the type of ads of course and... well maybe it wouldn't work but it would be a good start.
But no, I'm not going to disable adblock while there are still so many ads that clearly cross the line of what is aceptable. Sure I feel bad about it but that's just the way it is given that the other options are a) not using the internet or b) constantly seeing pictures of other peoples yellowing teeth.
Advertising is a risk, and always has been. I'm tired of advertisers (and content providers that depend on advertising) trying to shift responsibility to the consumer. If you spend money on a campaign and it delivers results beyond your initial expenditure, then the campaign was successful. There's no guarantee against failure, and it's absolutely certain that the majority of consumers simply won't care about your ads. It's part of the game. Accept it, or look for alternatives.
There seem to be two schools of business; one that tries to beat customers over the head with things, and one that tries to respect the customer as much as possible.
Historically, most web ads seem to have the first view. "Why, of course! All I have to do is treat the visitor like crap: store 75 cookies, throw up new windows, flash some animations, play loud noises, and trick them into clicking on things. Then they'll surely want to shell out cash for my products!"
The problem is, after seeing a few of these, I'm not going to spend time weeding out the good from the bad: it's like junk mail, after awhile it's just thrown away, and it doesn't even matter anymore if there might be a hidden gem.
I can only assume that a scam is being pulled: that there are ad managers who create annoying systems to meet artificial quotas, and then show their employers how many "millions of clicks or page views" they received. That way, they can demand huge sums of money for all the "exposure"; in reality, I'd be surprised if the ads do much good. If a site is "dying", it's not because visitors block ads, it's because companies are falling for the scam and paying advertisers who are essentially being offensive and misleading about their numbers.
Here are examples of effective ads:
- Hulu, because they made reasonable compromises to respect visitors. For example, they have far fewer commercials than an equivalent TV show, and an ad is often displayed "up front" to minimize interruptions later.
- Google, because they make plain text ads that stay out of the way. Not irritating? Good, now I'll actually read it.
So Ars Technica has the same fundamental problem as every publisher on earth-- how do you allow your content to reach the most eyes across the most channels and platforms while still maintaing full control (only showing your content with your ads intact).
I'm not sure you can have it both ways. You either have to trade in the open/free variable or accept it and some of the loss of revenue it entails as a tradeoff to the gained visibility.
Just like how Tivo has destroyed the television industry, right? I find it amazing that anyone believes they have a moral obligation to view advertisements.
I don't like ads, and I don't like subscribing. What you need to offer is micropayments. Figure out a way I can pay one cent (maybe 5 or 10, no more) when I like an article and I'll pay you sometimes, and that will be more money than you get showing me ads.
It needs to be something I only set up once, not once per website. It should probably be integrated into my browser so I don't have to find the button on the webpage (and then type in my password or something -- it better be one click).
Of course feel free to continue with ads for the people who don't block them.
You may object that people don't care and won't pay. But the article is saying "please don't block ads as a way to voluntarily pay". If you think sympathy or voluntary payment will work, set this up as a superior option for people to pay with.
Doing sufficiently good micropayments is a lot of work, but there are a hell of a lot of other websites with the same problem Ars has, so either license it to them or get them to help create it.
Micropayments have been tried and failed several times already but I think maybe it's time for someone to take another run at the problem. Jakob Nielsen had some relevant ideas.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980125.html
I practically have to use AdBlock on my N900 just to use some sites. Some flash advertisements are so processor intensive that my phone slows to a crawl.
I'm willing to whitelist them on my ad blocker, I'm not willing to whitelist their ad companies on my javascript filter. I don't trust their ad companies to run arbitrary javascript on my machine.
Not really. They do seem convinced that the model is workable and dismiss criticism out of hand.
Then, funnily, they offer this analogy: "Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn't pay. In a way, that's what ad blocking is doing to us."
Imagine running a restaurant where the food is free, and your business model is getting a cut of the mariachi band's tips.
Imagine publishing a newspaper funded in a very large part by classified advertisements, embedded advertisements, and obituaries. Imagine me, and a lot of other subscribers, reading only the news in the newspaper and not reading the classifieds or obits.
This model actually worked well for hundreds of years until the advertisers found that online advertisement could be cheaper and more effective than printed paper advertisement.
My habits have not changed. I don't tend to read the ads in papers or online.
Their business isn't free to operate and that's their point ... a business is run by people that have families and need a regular income.
> Imagine running a restaurant where the food is free, and your business model is getting a cut of the mariachi band's tips.
I would like such a restaurant and would gladly give the mariachi a tip. What I definitely wouldn't do is go there with a smug on my face as if it's my right to eat there for free.
I don't use ad-blocking at all ... websites that get too offensive I just stop visiting. Tried an ad-blocker for a month ... but with an ad-blocker active it's harder to punish the bad guys, while rewarding the respectful businesses. And flashy advertising is also a good indicator for (the lack of) quality.
If it stops working for publishers, they'll move more and more to a subscription-based model, and we will see a bigger push for DRMed content, not to mention that the Internet will probably stop being used as a distribution channel for professional journalism.
The notion that I should feel obligated to let someone try to persuade me of something is absurd.
Advertisers, the people who bought the ad, are paying for impressions in the hope of converting them into revenue. An impression spent on me has absolutely zero chance of ever generating any revenue or any other kind of value. This is a safe assumption that has held true in my decade or so of browsing the web. The impressions that I block are spent on someone else, where they have at least the potential to lead to conversions. Thus, I am helping the advertiser make more money.
The ones who lose out in this situation are the middle men: the agencies, networks and content providers. Though their impressions become more valuable, they have less of them to sell and this apparently works out to a loss. However, appealing to my sympathy about this is nonsensical. They are simply asking me to help them sell worthless impressions to some third party. I would never feel inclined to do that, no matter how indebted I felt to the content provider.
Ad supported sites who complain about blocking fail to see the big picture. Their entitled thinking goes no further than "when you do this, I get money, so you should/must do this".
If internet advertising is not sustainable in the face of ad blocking, then it is not sustainable at all.
Incidentally, asking me to actively avoid sites who's ads I don't plan to view is also absurd. The web simply does not, never has, and never could work that way. Nobody can be expected to add that layer of deliberation to the act of clicking on a link. By publishing an unsecured website, you are implicitly authorizing anybody to link to it and to view it in any modified form.
Basically, targeted listings PROVIDES value to viewers. Look at Craigs List. A site should have no problem hosting the ads on their own server and being associated with its advertisers if they respect their readers and what they see.
Content from 3rd party ad servers almost universally does not. They are designed to be as attention-grabbing as possible, stealing the resource of attention from your readers, and SHOULD be blocked.
My idea is a web app that big sites can drop on their servers where advertisers are the users. Advertisers get dynamic quotes from the system based on length coverage etc and demand by other advertisers during the same time, and can upload their ads directly to the sites server. Each site hosts the ads from THEIR web server in the same manner as they do their content images (without javascript) so they should be unblockable.
Basically, it's about giving medium size sites an easy option as possible to host ads directly from their own server. I have a few ideas for peer-to-peer ad sharing between websites as well, if anyone wants to bounce ideas or write some code, dhllndr at gmail, or aim: redfoxbeatbox
I'd use a list in Adblock that whitelisted sites that only ever showed adverts that never moved, never poped up, never used flash, never showed me body parts and never tried to sell me something that was obviously a scam.
Currently that list would effectively be empty I would expect, since the only sites that qualify would have no ads currently
It doesn't really do much for the sites in the long term, as the advertisers won't trust the analytics if these tools are regularly used or if they suspect they might be.
I think AdBlock for Chrome does what you suggest and then blocks using CSS.
Even if they stop trusting the stats, there's nothing they can do about it really. There's no way to tell if I see something or not. I would be glad to install such plugin... hopefully it will come to FF soon.
They can pay for referrals (or purchases if they don't trust the referrals, purchases are difficult to fake). People generally don't block paid Amazon links, unless they feel they're being tricked into following them.
Those who spy do not call it spying, it is those upon whom the spies spy who rightly call it spying.
Spies call spying a slew of disarming terms: Forensics, investigation, probes, intelligence, surveillance, research, observation, analysis, data gathering, data analysis, data mining, log filing, system testing, polling, questioning, interrogation, looking into, checking, double-checking, reviewing, verification, authentication, testing, evaluation, protection of the customer, the citizen, the nation, and more misleading terms being invented and deployed all the time.
Apologists for spying have an ancient and wide range of justifications for the practice and never admit it is not needed or wanted by the targets of spying. Instead, spies have forever claimed their offense is on behalf of the innocents who do not understand how dangerous the world is.
Now, like any other corporation, they have a product which they sell to a market. The market is advertisers -- that is, other businesses. What keeps the media functioning is not the audience. They make money from their advertisers. And remember, we're talking about the elite media. So they're trying to sell a good product, a product which raises advertising rates. And ask your friends in the advertising industry. That means that they want to adjust their audience to the more elite and affluent audience. That raises advertising rates. So what you have is institutions, corporations, big corporations, that are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses.
Well, what point of view would you expect to come out of this? I mean without any further assumptions, what you'd predict is that what comes out is a picture of the world, a perception of the world, that satisfies the needs and the interests and the perceptions of the sellers, the buyers and the product.
The alternative will be payola. Paid content. If advertising fails as a revenue method, why not sell mentions in the actual content? Why not write articles for pay? It'll happen. I bet it's already happening and in the best cases we can't even suspect a thing..
I guess a good compromise would be to not block the ads but hide them after loading (I think thats how the AdBlock extension for chrome works)?
I agree that educating users is a good plan here. Users should have adblockers active because ads sour our online experience and a large majority of sites show ads that distract from the content (Not to mention that we have lots of sites completely dedicated to spam). On the other hand, if a site has been giving you great content for years, it makes sense to support them. But of course, lots of big tech sites have sponsorship deals so its not like they're posting great content out of their love for us...
Even if the site isn't using a CPM model, getting paid by views, ad impressions still count towards getting better ad deals. For example when dealing with private ad-sales.
some people also use ad impressions to count pageviews, for example with Adsense, if you have 3 ad-units on one page, they count as one pageview.
Although, having a huge technical audience who doesn't click any ads will greatly decrease the CTR which will affect the eCPM the publisher is getting paid.
Because of this discussion I decided to unsubscribe (Google Chrome Adblocker https://chrome.google.com/extensions/search?itemlang=&q=...) from both EasyList and Chrome AdBlock custom filters and just custom-block ads that are offensive.
Their 'test' solution sounds like the way to go. If they figured out a decent way to simply bust the whole page for the adblockers they should just go for it.
If I went to a site and it was totally broken due to my blocking the ads I would either a) whitelist it or b) stop going there. Sounds like exactly what they're trying to get users to do.
The music and movie industry are having a hard time, too! Soon it will be the newspapers and book publishers. People realise that they don't need publishing companies and soon people will realise that they don't need advertising. But I think that people will always need musicians, actors, and writers.
the people who block ads are never going to click on them anyway, so it's a moot point. it isn't ad blocking that is devastating sites, it's ineffective advertising.
Do you disable adblock when you're not tethering? If AT&T had no bandwidth cap, would you disable adblock?
I don't think bandwidth limitations are your true reason for blocking ads. Ads are typically a tiny fraction of bandwidth usage. You would have to be very close to your 5GB cap each month for blocking them to make a difference.
From some spot-checking, ads are around 1/2 the bandwidth typically at major websites, not "a tiny fraction". Flash ads are the main culprit, because a single one can be pretty large, so the problem could be partly solved by just blocking Flash ads instead of all ads.
I guess I should have explained my point better. Things like streaming video consume a lot more bandwidth than loading web pages. For example, watching Hulu for an hour transfers 200MB if you're using the low-quality 480kbps stream. Google News is about 500KB, so you'd have to load it every 9 seconds for an hour to consume the same amount of bandwidth. A typical page load on Ars Technica is around 100KB, so you'd have to rack up 2000 page views to transfer 200MB.
"I don't think bandwidth limitations are your true reason for blocking ads."
I don't have the ability to downvote comments, so I'd just like to say that accusing someone of being deceptive in such a trivial context with so little evidence is really unbecoming.
Actually, I think there's quite a bit of evidence for my claim. Think about it. Apparently, one month the OP approached or exceeded his bandwidth cap. Afterwards he thought, "How can I reduce the amount of bandwidth I consume? I know, block ads!"
What an amazing coincidence that his bandwidth-reduction strategy also happens to get rid of annoying ads. And how convenient that he can blame AT&T's bandwidth cap for hurting sites like Ars.
I'm not accusing him of deception. I'm accusing him of rationalizing. There are plenty of reasons to block ads. For example, I block ads because I dislike most of them. I know it hurts sites that depend on ad revenue, but I simply don't like ads and I'm too lazy to play around with whitelists and blacklists. I'm lazy and selfish, but I'm not rationalizing.
Sure, there are tons of annoying ads that get in your face and make you want to commit suicide. But there's an easy solution: FlashBlock. Regular ads come through, and ridiculous ads turn into a little box with an activate button.
Personally I use ad-blockers because flash is broken and inevitably will break all modern-browsers at one point or another, especially newspaper sites that seem to think there's no such thing as too much flash.
It's amazing how upset people get over ads. I wonder how these same anti-ad fanatics deal with other forms of advertising in their day to day life.
If I were Ars or any other site that relied on ad revenue, I probably wouldn't remove any features, but I would put up an atrocious, gigantic, red, flashing banner on the site that was only shown to Adblock users saying, "Please don't use AdBlock! It's hurting us."
Perhaps the solution is some sort of code of conduct for advertisers. If ads are discreet and respectful of the viewer then I'd certainly be prepared to stop blocking them.