Slashdot Mirror
Advertisers Escalate Banner Ad War
AnonymousComrade writes: "In today's Newsbytes, there is an article about MediaBEAM GmbH, a German company that say they have developed Web server software that can detect whether a home browser is blocking banner ads or pop-ups. If the Web server detects blocking software, a message appears on the screen advising the 'free-loading' surfer that he has two choices if he wants access to the Web site's content: pay for it or be exposed to the ads. This sounds strange to me. Can they really include something in the download (Java or JS, I assume) that detects whether an ad picture has been downloaded or not? What if you have blocking S/W that not just blocks the download of the ad picture, but also modifies the HTML on-the-fly (a la the Proxomitron). Can they really distinguish this from a remote ad server that just isn't responding? And how long will it take before ad blocking S/W is updated to block this blocking-detection mechanism?"
My sanity.
As a user of the Proxomitron, I have three words for these numbnuts: BRING IT ON.
Pathetic.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
This sounds strange to me. Can they really include something in the download (Java or JS, I assume) that detects whether an ad picture has been downloaded or not?
They can just check the access.log - however they will never know if it actually has been displayed.
damn.. Stuff like this gotta break some rule of "personal preferences" (or whatever..)
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
Just make sure the ads would be downloaded before the good stuff on a normal browser. Then hold the good stuff until the ads are loaded (from the same IP number). If no ads are loaded after a timeout period, send bad stuff instead of good stuff. I suppose you could do this with frames, or by partial uploading of html pages (upload the html referring to ads, and hold the rest without closing the connection).
Svein.
If pop up ads started using techniques like this AnonymousComrade suggests, eventually the DMCA would apply. They could encrypt their content, their ActiveX control could decrypt it, and hacking IE to kill the popups would be illegal. They wouldn't even have to use real encryption. They could use ROT13, and the legislation would still work. Then they can use the revenue generated by the ads to purchase more congresspeople. It'll be great!
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Can they really include something in the download (Java or JS, I assume) that detects whether an ad picture has been downloaded or not?
Hmm...
I guess they could cycle through document.images[..] in Javascript/JScript to check the existence/properties of each image element, and pop up a window if something was amiss...
Not sure what they could do if client-side scripting was disabled though. Other than perhaps checking the weblogs through a server script to see if an HTTP GET was made from your IP address to a particular ad object... sounds onerous.
From the article, sounds like the former?
Information wants to be beer.
Only way I can think of is to make popup windows named, and then use JavaScript to check that mypopup.images['myimage'].src (??? not used JS for ages) is what it should be...
I hate the ludicrous number of banner ads on websites as much as anyone, but is it really that hard to understand why sites would want to force people to download/display them? I mean, the vast majority of sites out there (no, I'm not talking about pr0n) are free. Some, especially topical sites, take a great deal of time and effort to maintain, and yet we are quite happy to sit here, blocking the ads that pay for their maintenance, on the flimsy moral objection that somehow they are 'bad'.
Now I don't extend this to all ads - pop-up windows suck ass; there is a reasonable objection here, as spawning new windows on your system definitely interferes with the normal operation of your computer. But harmless banner ads - if they piss you off too much, as they sometimes do with me, don't visit the website. You can't expect to get a product (the website) for free just because you don't like how you're paying for it.
As an alternative, I wonder how many people (I am one, btw) have donated to SatireWire via the Amazon Honour System?
I dunno, but this sounds awfully "BORG" like. Even if they can figure out exactly what's getting through to, and visibile to my browser, do I want someone to know that information ?
Do websites using this bleeding edge ad technology take into account the variety of settings and the reasons for them ?
For example, the public library or a school. It bans ads to protect the little kids doing homework, but can't afford, not equitably employ "pay per play" sites.
Likewise, what about those who are in work situations where firewall and proxy filters are employed ?
This entire scheme seems almost too myopic
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Always there is a third option.
In this case, it is to ignore the offensive website. When a company starts to insult the decisions of potential customers, they lose more customers than they gain.
But what if you need something that the website provides? Look elsewhere. When there are enough people requiring the services of one company, but who do not want to go to that company, another can come in. By being freindlier to their customers, all else being equal, they can gobble up market share.
But it's your choice whether the companies force-advertising you will succeed or not, because they depend on you, and not the other way around.
...that they're fighting this battle on technical grounds. I hope we see a good clean fight, technology vs. technology, with no lawyers.
May the best code win.
--G
..Michael didn't say anything. AnonymousComrade did.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
In addition, in today's age of worms upon virus upon other nasty things, there is a sufficiently significant (probably around 10%) of users that have turned off Active Scripting in IE or the equivalent in NS to avoid such problems. I very much believe that these users have more of a right to keep this off than an advertizer has to force you to look at an ad.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The server can detect if your browser, after requesting an HTML page, also requests the contained images. I guess it works only if the pages are served from the sames server as the images.
Of course, you'll always see at least one web page, as the server doesn't know yet if you'll request the ads as well. If you don't, it can deny to handle further requests from your IP. They also cannot make sure (at least not by tracking requests) the ad is actually displayed, they can only make sure it's downloaded.
Still, I don't see a wide success for this technology. What about multiple people using the same IP -- the first one blocked ads, now the site is blocked for the other users as well? Even worse, dynamic IPs -- the guy who previously had my dial-up connection's IP blocked ads, now I cannot view the sites? Of course, they could require cookies, but those users that understand cookies will be really pissed off if they have to accept cookies they don't want to have to see ads they don't want to see.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Lots of problems with this:
:)
- The biggest problem I see is that many sites run ads from a third party network (eg, Doubleclick). More than likely this would only work for ads served by the same server.
- What if you simply disabled image downloading all together? Or use Lynx? Or disable whatever technology they are using (Java, JS, whatever) for other reasons, if that's the case?
- If you're behind a proxy, often times images are downloaded via a different IP than other content (images are generally considered cachable). I've seen this in my logs many times, mostly with scripts (which are generally non-cachable). Or, the user may download the image from a cache, and the server might assume the user hasn't seen it. With larger ISPs who cache content, this is easily conceivable.
- If you chose not to see ads, you probably aren't going to purchase any products advertised. So the advertisers get cheated, the visitors annoyed, and the site owner is the only one potentially gaining anything (though pissing everyone off isn't a good way to make money).
I'm so sick of ads personally, I've disabled Flash and Java (both of which seem to be used more for ads than anything else). I've also added *.doubleclick.net and a few others to my DNS cache (on my home network), so ads from those places simply come up empty for me (no ad servers at 127.0.0.1
This reminds me of the CD copy protection crap: trying to extend a basic technology for purposes it wasn't intended for, for corporate gain, that only serves to harm the consumer. It won't fly.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
one way they could do it is with a client-side script/applet that runs at the very tail-end of a loaded document. the client side stuff could profile the document object exactly as it is loaded and displayed on the browser, instructing the browser to describe the various properties of the document's objects (visible=false, unavailable=true, whatever)... that would reveal a blocked ad. then the script phones home with the results, detailed, or with a simple pass/ fail.
another way they could do it is by sensing whether or not the client sends out a request for the ad from the ad server at all.
if either is the case, so what? the next move in the arms race is for the blocking software companies to request the image anyways... just not display it, or spoof the document properties that indicate a properly displayed and enabled ad.
the german company mediabeam is ratcheting up the arms race, that is all.
i think the web ad ecosystem is in for an overhaul anyways... pop-under ads, etc., just seem like a desparate last-ditch attempt at old-school ideas of ad prominence... the web is not tv, it is not radio... they will get it someday.
why not go for subtlety instead? win users over to your site with gentle persuasion, not howling insistence.
what the heck am i talking about? try google's understated and creative approach (zdnet article from june). wired also raved about google's novel ad approaches, all of which have a simple theme: potential customers want to be gently persuaded, not knocked over the head with a salami and dragged to your storefront. (the wired article is in the current october issue- "Google's Secret Formula: How a no-nonsense search engine built a stealth advertising machine." only on newstands... not available on line until october 16)
you don't need fancy graphics... a few bytes of ascii with an href in the right spot and you probably have a better time at snagging a customer than any strongarm tactics anyways...
did you like my post? have me write one for you and boost your karma with just a small one-time donation of $5.95. but act now! i'm slowly losing my faculties so karma supplies are limited.
;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm not trying to flame anyone.
:)
When we read our daily paper (which we pay for) we get ads too, right? What makes sites that much different? We don't pay for the contest on sites, in stead we see ads, is that so bad? Sure, I hate pop-up ads as much as you do and I thing those should be shot on sight.
But really, does a small banner like the one on slashdot bother that much? I'm okay with the ads on Zdnet and C|net too (the ones in the center of the article). Just ignore it, no one is forcing you to click on it. Just as no one is forcing you to go and buy whatever is advertized in your local paper.
Keep it as it is now, don't force people to click on ads or to close a window that pops up each time you surf a site and people will have no problem with the ads.
Just my 0.02 euros
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
And how are the web site owners supposed to pay for the bandwidth you're using?
If you don't want to give them an income directly and don't want to give them an income indirectly, are they just supposed to pay out of the goodness of their hearts?
My Journal
The easy way to annoy users of banner blocking software is to name images vital to the site browsing something like banner or ad. That stops them right there, works very well.
With that said, I must say that I also use banner blocking software these days. I know that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and that bannerads helps paying for the site. So I have accepted banners for a long time.
But with the introduction of popup/under ads on so many sites these days, it was just too much for me.
A charitable view of this product, but a seriously naive view of what caused the dot-com crash. First, not every dot-com had its business model predicated on ad revenue. But the real reason that the dot-coms crashed is a simple one. They weren't creating any value. In an economy that rewards profits, very few of the dot-coms' business plans actually recognized this simple fact. Many were predicated on some Ponzi-like exit strategy (if they had one at all), be it an IPO, acquisition, or the holy grail, viral adoption.
The reality is that there was simply too much venture capital and too few experienced investors. In '98, you could write a business plan on a piece of toilet paper and get it funded by someone. Now, if you don't have a clear path to profitability with 24 months, a shipping product, near break-even revenues, and a seasoned management team, don't even bother wasting the trees to print your plan. The VCs don't want to see it. They're still trying to dig their way out of billions in failed companies and trying to save the companies they still have.
These guys would probably have ruled the dot-com world, if they'd gotten their act together and released this when it might have been useful.
Probably not. Most likely, they'd have gone the same way as all of the other companies who were part of the failed VC food chain. Once the capital dried up, it would have only been a matter of time before companies stopped buying their software. This is the secondary fall-out that killed all the companies with products and sales that were geared towards dot-com infrastructure. These guys would have been no different. As it stands now, this one shouldn't even be let out of the gate.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
While much of the people here seem to think that everything that is easily replicated should be free (like software), there is a question of paying for intellectual content online.
Sure, to draw the metaphor out a bit more, if people are willing to create free software in their sparetime, other people should be willing to create free content of other sorts (ie, Slashdot for example, would be created by people who didn't get paid to do this). However, even if you decide to undertake a free software project in your spare time, usually you don't have to shoulder the cost of distribution all by yourself.
Bandwidth costs money. The better the content, the more bandwidth it'll take. So even if you had a society where people were willing to generate all your content for free...you still have to pay for bandwidth.
I'd imagine the people in the content business also like to get paid for their work occasionally too. Having money to eat is a good thing.
Furthermore, all the people who say "You have a third alternative, take your business elsewhere" when presented with the option to pay for content or view ads...well, I mean sure you have that option. But you're not exactly taking any business anywhere. If you're not viewing a site's ads, you're not making them any revenue. And if you're not paying them for a subscription, again, they're still not seeing any revenue. So, by your taking your business elsewhere, you're _helping_ them, by not wasting their bandwidth and not giving anything back. Not exactly a punishment.
Until we shed this thing we call a market economy, you're going to have to give some value back for people to even attempt to give you anything.
A lot of sites really don't have anything to sell. Sure, the idea of Amazon or eBay having banner ads is a bit absurd, but news sites, opinion places, comic strips, or basically any place you go for information also needs to be able to support itself, and I really doubt /., for instance, could make a living of selling nifty t-shirts.
Visit me on #weirdness on the Galaxynet.
downloads the ad anyway, but directs the browser to skip the image? The ad would still be useless, at the cost of bandwidth. I'm sure that no web server can detect this trick.
¦ ©® ±
"...it enables the Web server to establish contact with a surfer's browser and then count the number of ads displayed on a screen."
If I hit "G" in Opera, every image on the page disappears. Yeah, all the nice ones like the picture of the foot, the mainboard, the greenback, the Apple logo...but also the "How many different development tools do you use? Click here" SourceForge banner ad up the top. If a site is well designed like slashdot (and I'll get a few flames on that no doubt) and has the alt= attribute set in the <img> tag, I can turn images off and still see "It's funny. Laugh." and "Technology" etc instead. Of course, this is hopeless for some sites, like AnandTech (which looks great with images turned on, but I think is poorly designed nonetheless), and sites where you want to see the pretty pictures (I'm thinking of news sites like BBC News; I don't know about you :P), and it also tends to be quite pointless in terms of blocking ads because it's rather like executing fifty people because you know one of them is a death row escapee, but I just thought I'd mention it, because it seems that this software would prevent you from even choosing to turn all images off in your browser. Frankly, I'd like to know how they do this considering the many different browser types out there, but I presume they can and do, using Java probably. If any web designers can enlighten me, please do.
My question is, how much right does a site have to tell me that I may not turn off images altogether? Technically I am not even blocking the ads; I am simply choosing to ignore all the <img src=""> on a site, and instead am displaying the <img alt="">, which prevents me from downloading the image itself. There's still a little box indicating an image, with "Click here" inside it if it's an ad. Does that count? It also seems ridiculous that a site can penalise you based on what browser you choose to view it with, because text-based browsers such as Lynx would surely be affected by any site running the software developed by GmbH. I realise that few people run Lynx or other text browsers any more, but it's still something to consider. I know sites need their revenue, but I can't believe they think forcing people to look at their ads is going to help. I for one already boycott sites with too many ads (although popups aren't a problem any more since I have disabled them, using Opera), and the more in-your-face an ad is, the more annoying I find it, and the less I feel inclined to click on it. As far as I can tell, this is about as in-your-face as you can get. Do sites honestly believe this is going to increase their revenue?
A word can paint a thousand pictures
How many people (percentage wise) actually block ads do you think? I can't imagine that it is a significant part of the population. Any site owners care to comment?
Additionally, I noticed that the first paragraph of the story says this blocking adds insult to injury. I'm injuring someone by merely visiting their page?
Can they really distinguish this from a remote ad server that just isn't responding?
You betcha. Two ways off the top of my head, one client side, one server side (assuming you serve your own ads). The first, client side, was actually done by hotornot.com for a while. Basically, if the picture wasn't found, it would dump to the next page. This was done in javascript. On the server side, it gets a bit trickier, as you need to wait to finish sending the HTML until after you've received the request for the ad. If the browser doesn't request it, insert a meta-refresh to your "bad user" page.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Or they're running log analyzing software on both the web page and the ad server. When a client requests more HTML pages than ads, he's obviously using a blocker software.
However, such a software can easily be countered by loading ads and then not displaying them, which would hurt online advertising much more than today's blockers...
So, now, according to YOU, the peer-to-peer free flow of information THAT IS THE INTERNET (and had been for 20+ years) is suddenly "leeching" because some loser dot-bomb can't think of a real way to make money? Give me a break.
I don't recall Sunsite or Tsx-11 forcing ascii-ads down our throats in the FTP banner back in '93. I don't recall Tim Berners-Lee pining for an internet full of banner ads and griping about "leeches". I don't recall seeing the official DOD document subsection about preventing "leechers".
The usual mantra that originates from the dot-bombers, which you so aptly seem to parrot here, is that if you somehow block ads you are then "stealing" from the web site.
Excuse me? I pay for MY end of the pipe. I pay for the packets going in and out of MY end of the internet...are the dot-bombers going to pay ME for their use of my bandwidth to broadcast crap? Oh, didn't think so...the shoe is on the other foot now. Most spammers scuttle away like roaches when you say this to them, too.
Here's a newsflash: despite the best and worst efforts of dot-bombers, the Internet IS NOT LIKE TELEVISION. This is a peer-to-peer network we all share in. DON'T LIKE IT? THEN CLOSE UP SHOP AND SET UP ON AOL INSTEAD OF GRIPING ABOUT INTERNET "LEECHERS". If you want to force ads down the throats of the clueless in a server-based environment, AOL and MSN are designed for you...but not the Internet.
(We put up with 4 years of dot-bomb hyperbole and BS, and now we have to put up with another 4 of the former dot-bombers griping about how it was everyone else's fault they didn't make any money.)
While the interested geeks develop anti-content-blocker schemes, MediaBeam realized what it's really about: The masses want "free" content. The effort, which is necessary to fool the webserver into thinking that ads are shown while in reality they are cleverly redirected to the bitbucket, is bigger than just downloading and suffering through them. Is websurfing really fun when you always have to question wether that page you see is really the one you wanted? Or is it just the heavily abbreviated version for ad-blockers? Why aren't people complaining about this slow server? Maybe it's fast for them cause they don't block the ads? Nah, that can't be it. My ad-blocker behaves just like the real browser, it just doesn't show the ads. Or are they using new methods of detection and my blocker doesn't fool them anymore? Guess I'll have to upgrade. Again.
First thing: the server does not know if the client downloaded the add, since the adds are usually served from a third party server.
/etc/hosts long ago, so I do not have to download 'material' from them that I am not interested in anyway.
And who is "double-click"? I am sure you don't mean doubleclick.net, which I mapped to a non-existant IP address in my
I just don't see why I should have to download stuff I don't want.
Oh, c'mon, you really think there is a large % of people actually blocking ads? It's a small group, 10% at best. Most of the crowd visiting those pages don't even know what a proxy or ad blocking software is, in fact most let spyware remain installed without they noticing.
.coms don't get their .000005 cent for an ad banner display that i am never ever going to see or click, yet steals *my* bandwidth and even attempts to identify *me* with their stupid cookies?
The DOT.com crash was the result of its own demise. Some people were sold the idea of internet being the ultimate and biggest ever shopping mall, so they created an artificial sense or bubble that simply popped up when the reality check came; which was, basically, way too much more offer than real demand. Everyone knows that actually 70% of the DOT commers were in excess; it was simply a matter of time.
Now would you really check how much is asked for getting to the net on the first place, why they seem to think you have to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month for T1 like links; when people in Sweden pay 20$ montly for 10mbps lan speed like links to their homes?
I have to pay 80US$ for 256/64 DSL with forced NAT and no real ip or higher speeds options available, since this is "residential service". Now tell me, do i give a damn if the
Their "business" models were flawed from the first place.
Liberal capitalism is darwinian by its nature; leaving everything to the market forces alone will result in collapse of the small or the weak, no matter what.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
here's what I do :
I maintain DNS entries of the sites I wish not to receive ads from and map them onto a local machine.
I then configure Apache to respond to the requests using mod_perl to strip the paths from the URI and leave me with just the filename.
I then return an image OF MY CHOOSING to be displayed in my browser. I have set of images to choose from with pictures made in various banner sizes from anime / pr0n / abstract / auto-texture generating scripts / mandlebrots / swf files I have made.
It makes online life more interesting and colourful.
By logging your outgoing requests you can even change the graphics for programs like icq & other banner toting stuff.
Some places defeat my plan by using their own hostname (images.slashdot.com is one example) or by using IP addresses. I plan to build an Apache proxy module for these but haven't got round to it yet.
Most of the websites I visit are return visits anyway so you soon get a feel for the ways the ad system works.
By using a DNS & Proxy I can configure not just my workstation but my whoel LAN so it becomes OS/Browser agnostic.
M
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
It may be argued that trees are a public resource as well, but most news print comes from recycled paper or stands that were planted for the purpose. It's hard to argue that trees privatly planted are a public resource.
This stupid stuff will never work. Blocking or otherwise anoying users will just reduce the number of users the publication has. No readers makes for no revenue. Publications that depend on advert revenue will have to adjust to the world as it is. The rest of us will have to find other ways of getting information if those publications fail.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
How about I advise the offending web site that they are one among many, and that I can view the same content somewhere else where I am not FORCED to look at ads
You can't make me watch ads on television, or listen to them on the radio, or read them in the paper. What makes them think I should be forced to watch them on my computer screen? Any site that trys something like this will lose viewers big time.... I'm using webwasher right now. It prevents those pop-up windows from appearing on a Nimda infected web server and and it even cancels out Salon's new click-through ads (not that I read much on Salon anyway).
Go ahead, try out your new "forced ads"... I'm ready for ya.
127.0.0.1 ad-adex3.flycast.com
127.0.0.1 ad-flow.com
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad2.peel.com
127.0.0.1 ad.iwin.com
127.0.0.1 adbureau.net
127.0.0.1 admonitor.net
127.0.0.1 adcontroller.unicast.com
127.0.0.1 ads.1bn.org
127.0.0.1 ads.gamespy.com
127.0.0.1 ads20.focalink.com
127.0.0.1 ads.x10.com
127.0.0.1 clubchance.com
127.0.0.1 fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 focalink.com
127.0.0.1 friendfinder.com
127.0.0.1 hits2you.hypermart.net
127.0.0.1 ln.doublclick.net
127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 media.fastclick.net
127.0.0.1 msn.com
127.0.0.1 msnbc.com
127.0.0.1 popups.infostart.com
127.0.0.1 servedby.advertising.com
127.0.0.1 x10.com
Considering that the spirit of copyright laws, as stated in Article I, Section 8, of the US Constitution, is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", then one might also assume that pop-up ads have the same purpose.
However, the people who wrote that Constitution also put there the exact means by which that progress would be promoted: "by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Rights to their respective Writings and Discoveries". There's no mention of advertising anywhere. And there's no provision for forcing anyone to read what they don't want to read. You can rip off some pages of a book and burn them if you want to. You can use a machine or a software to do that. The only restriction is that you cannot copy and distribute a writing within the limited time when the copyright is in force, without permission from the author.
The problem with banner ads is they're messed up. You shouldn't be responsible for making people click on banner ads, they should be good enough for people to click on them out of curiosity.
Just for a few of the people who don't know how banner ads work, let me explain: Back when banner ads used to work (they really did make money once), they were run on a per-veiw basis, not per-click. When I got started advertising on my site (about 1998), per-click, and per-sale were becoming popular.
Now here's the problem with either of those methods: People don't really care how creative the ads are, so everyone gets bored, and the sites running the ads go broke, while the advertiser doesn't get many ads, but at least they aren't loosing anything.
Per view is a better way IMHO, because the ads seem to be less boring, and the sites make more money. In turn the advertiser will get more people because the ads are less boring. Putting this back into the topic... People might not block ads if they were less boring.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Or javascript... but noting is stopping a proxy from making them THINK they downloaded it, but block it.
Really... you know... who cares.
Sites that are *free*, that don't use my content or efforts to make the site work (as opposed to say, napster or CDDB or slashdot...)... I couldn't care less if they put up banners, or want to 'force' me to read their banners.
For the most part, I don't *care* if there is a simple, normal banner (a-la slashdot). They don't bother me one bit.
I vote with my money...
And you know what else? Those x-10 pop-under ads? As much as they annoyed me.. they DO Make me want to go buy some of those cameras..
Sorry, I'm being a muppet! No client side functionality is required - it can all be done using a web server module.
Its really simple:
Since each banner ad needs to be HTTP requested from the server - and proxies tend to remove instances of <img src="bannerad.gif"... with their own blank image, its a doddle to track.
The evil marketing guy forces the webdesigner to put a banner on the top of the page. The contents of the page is in a IFRAME tag.
If a browser requests the IFRAME src but not the banner, the server can send a page that says that you have to view the banner or pay.
This is only one way of doing it.
Java script and VB script can do even more marketing things.
And the marketing guy's don't care about lynx (and not even mozilla) beacuse none of their target audience uses lynx anyway.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
... by for instancem, viewing ads? It isn't exactly free to host sites, especially good ones.
Sadly, I can't stand the popups either, so I am very depressed by the fact that the advertisers didn't stick to normal banners, that would be the best choice. Doesn't really bother anyone, and if it is interesting... I click. Otherwise, I don't.
I'm equally depressed by the sorry mofos that use filters. That is kinda like stealing. Well, I guess you think you are Robin Hood liberating the internet. No, you are lowering the quality of the internet, by driving providers out of business. By taking their stuff for free. Do you do the same in stores?
I love free internet, and ad-free internet - but I don't demand that everyone can afford to bring you the latest news, articles or whatever it may be for free. Can you do that?
Most likely they just detect if the banner has been displayed. On the client side blocking software, I'm assuming, just doesn't download the banners and blocks popup windows from even oppening, so if the ads don't get loaded successfully first, don't display content. Once the server has a successful load of the ad, you can send the content.
This of course won't stop anti-ad software from simply downloading the ad and not putting it on screen, but most blocking mechanisms just don't download the ad anyways.
However I think that we should not use blocking software. You are getting "free as in beer" content, so you should be required to "pay" for it, in this case with your time. The servers that you are reading your pages off of have bills to pay, and the only way that most of them can do this is to serve ads. The only reason why ads have gotten so fscking annoying is because the conventional style isn't working. Why isn't it working? Because people block it. So thus the more you work against the system, the nastier it will become.
Now seriously, how much trouble is it to read around a huge ad in the middle of your page? I'm being serious here. I have mental filtering. I just don't notice them anymore. I close popups usually before they're finished loading and even sometimes if I think the content is good I'll go and click on the ad just to give them a bit more money. Having these ads maybe adds 5% to the time required to read the article. Big whoop. Do it so that they can get paid. There is no free lunch, they have bills to pay and the least that you can do is to at least glance at the ads and sometimes click so that they can pay their bills. Because if people keep blocking then we will be forced to start physically paying to view pages, via micropayments perhaps, but we will pay because they have to pay their bills. It is much cheaper for us to just put up with the ads and that way it won't get much worse, and we won't be faced with having to pay physical cash to view the stuff that we want to view.
People aregue about "Artists' rights" and that they should be paid for their music that you download in MP3 form. Although I agree with this, the same thing applies here. People have spent their time to write the articles that you are viewing, and they deserve your patronage to put up with the ads so that they can pay their bills.
If God gave us curiosity
Advertisers are not receiving adequate response for the amount of money they sink into online ads. The proliferation of in-your-face pop-up ads was their first response. Those still don't generate the desired traffic. They mistakenly believe that this is caused by ad blocking software. Marketing types can't believe that anyone can possibly resist their clever, highly targeted advertising campaigns. Therefore, too many folks must be blocking the ads -- if they see the ads, they won't be able to resist them. The marketers fail to realize that the largest group of ad-blocking users are people like us. We're not going to click on the ads even if they are forced upon us. If anything, we are less likely to as a form of protest.
Write software, perhaps similar to a 'honey trap' that runs in your browser, and passes back the results to the 'bludger detector' that make it look like you are reading the ads. This could happen silently as a service, downloading the ad's, but blocking them out on your page, so you don't have to see them. Ho hum
Statistics taken from my filter proxy in use (Webwasher) since March 12th 2001 :
Filtered images : 229994
Filtered windows : 15735
A good banner is a dead banner !
www.directbox.com allegedly already uses the adblocker-blocker software on it's server.
try the button "gastzugang" on the bottom right...
PAT
SEO Test: TIGI und SEBASTIAN - Online Shop - V
...steals *my* bandwidth and even attempts to identify *me* with their stupid cookies?
How is YOU CHOOSING to visit their site them stealing from you? It's more like you STEALING content from them without paying the price(ads). And without cookies, the web would be one boring, static world (yes, I know there's URL session mangement but that has it's own problems).
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I would be willing to bet that less than 1% of internet users know enough to actually use serious blocking software. The technology in this article is basically targeting power users who would never click a banner ad anyway.
Why don't the ad houses accept this and save bandwidth for the people who actually click on the "Your internet connection is not optimized!" windows?
Adversive
My cat's breath smells like cat food.
I've been browsing now with animation and pop up windows turned off since Mozilla got fast enough to use on a regular basis. The web is a lot less annoying this way. I don't have any problem not doing business (or reading the pages of) a company that demands that I turn that stuff back on.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I've posted this opinion before in response to other such stories, about interstitials etc, and it is thus:
I hope the large commercial sites JUMP right into this. Instead of forcing people away from ad-blocking (and I see no reason that Mozilla can't be modified to make their system think that the image has been loaded, without displaying it), what they will do is force people AWAY from such sites.
No reasonable person should submit to allowing ads to drop tracker cookies on your system, that continue to track even WHEN you aren't using their site.
In my opinion, tracker cookies taking information for free without compensating the user, is just as much stealing as is viewing a site that uses such obnoxious means without viewing the ads. As a matter of fact, by doing this, they've more or less ASKED for this to happen to them.
What this will accomplish is to drive traffic away from commercial sites and back to enthusiast sites that contain most of the Internet's best content anyway.
This is but the next escalation. I expect the next thing these sites will do is start blocking Konqueror and Mozilla. However, Konqueror allows you to spoof to a site what your OS/Browser, etc is, and I expect this is a feature easily added to Mozilla as well.
As a curious aside, I use Hotmail occasionally. On the MSN home page, afer you've logged in to Hotmail, it will show your local news and weather... I noticed the other day that it doesn't show this when I'm using Konqueror, but does on my `Doze machine running IE at work... Just for curiosity, I set Konqueror to say that it's IE 5.5 to the site, and voila! it shows my local news and weather... So it looks like MS is discriminating against browsers other than IE to discourage you to use any other...
What will come next after Mozilla/Konqueror start downloading but not displaying these ads, and after they try to block them (followed by people setting Mozilla/Konqueror to "spoof" their ID to IE), will be the replacement of the simple ASCII identifier with something encrypted, so that it's difficult for OSS browsers to emulate. This would invoke the DMCA, and it's only a matter of time before MS starts using that club.
I'm sure good `ole Microsoft, who has made IE the browser of choice for marketers everywhere (including their own), is already thinking of this.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
While I'm typing this in, I'm reading the this ad for Think Geek. See, I don't block banner ads. But sometimes I am tempted to when I see ads like this one.
The kinds of ads I want to block are the obtrusive ones. Pop-ups, pop-unders, monster-box, and jump-through ads are NOT designed that way to get around blocking software. If the software was working, they too would be blocked. Instead, what they are designed to do is get people to SEE them when they are otherwise busy. TV is a passive medium. Sure, sometimes people take a bathroom break, or run to the frig, during the commercials. Yet free TV is surviving, even with competition from more networks, all the channels you can get on cable, and of course the internet. So the ads must be working since the TV stations and networks are still on the air. That's because TV is mostly passive, and enough people are too lazy to get off the couch when the commercials do come on, that ads do make impressions. You can't click on them, but eventually they effect your thoughts, and your buying patterns. It's not instant gratification for the advertisers, but it's working, and working well.
The internet is different. People are focused when they get online (else they'd plop back down on the couch and watch TV). They have some idea what they want from the internet and try to get it. Advertising on the internet has to compete with whatever it is the user is focused on. There's no time out to get their attention. People don't click through very often because that diverts them from their goal. Maybe if there was a one-click way to save an ad and come back to it later when you are ready for it, more people might. I know I would. It probably wouldn't be enough.
But advertisers weren't expecting the same results the get from TV to come from the internet. They were expecting more. For decades advertisers wanted some way to get a faster and more accurate check on how well ads work. When the internet came along, they saw it as a gold mine, but not for making subconscious psychological impressions on our buying habits, but rather, to track us, count us, and know what works to influence us and what doesn't. This is the big reason they started with click-throughs ... to count how many people saw the ad and showed some interest. Auditing was an auxiliary advantage.
But people also resist. And as I said before, they are focused on something else. The kind of feedback the advertisers want is too quick to get a valid response. Just this morning I saw an ad for a product from IBM that piqued my interest. But I didn't click on the ad, because I was still looking for something else. About 20 minutes later I went over to IBM to find out more. But I just typed the domain and went direct. So some web site didn't get a fraction of a penny all because the model is wrong.
And now we have intrusive ads. They try harder and harder to get us to react ... and react RIGHT NOW. And it's not really so much because they can't wait 20 minutes to sell us something, but rather because the immediacy is the only way to measure us, track us, and count us. If they have to wait 20 minutes for me to type in a web site name and visit them, they have no idea which ad campaign brought me in. The internet seemed like this was just the thing to do this, but they also forgot about some things, including the fact that people are going to be (often intensely) focused when online. So ultimately it doesn't work very well, and they are still trying to beat this dead horse.
And intrusive ads are annoying. They do divert people when they want to be focused, and people get pissed off. This is why I believe most people are tempted to start blocking ads. The more intrusive they get, the more people will want to block them, either to avoid the annoyance, or to protect their privacy (more collateral damage). Michael was right on the mark for the title for this Slashdot article. It is a war, and it is escalating.
Impression ads do work on the internet. They may not work quite as well as on TV or radio, but when well done, people will remember things they have seen. If advertisers would just give up the misguided quest for the holy grail of immediate tracking data, maybe they could get some advertising that really brings interested and paying customers ... eventually.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If we followed all the calls to concede any ad blocking, which is done by a very small minority of web surfers btw, the pop unders and flash commercials will continue to happen. The job of many sites isn't just to break even but to milk the internet for all its worth and when it comes to privacy issues users will respond unkindly.
I draw the line when the ads become intrusive.
This is completely arbitrary, first you defend ads and registration then condemn pop-unders then later condemn animanted gifs. If you're not letting the gif play out, guess what - you're blocking 'regular ads' too.
For the most part this software is one the many attempts to come up with an excuse to explain why so-and-so.com isn't making money. They should re-examine their business plan if their bigest threat is ad blockers.
I don't think the tiny fraction of people blocking banner ads has a significant impact on whether banner ads are working or not. A more important factor is that after a while, everyone just starts to tune them out. The Brunching Shuttlecocks humor site used to make the link to the current day's article be in the form of a banner-sized graphic. It literally took me *months* to notice it, because my brain is totally wired to ignore graphics of that shape at the top of web pages. And I don't think I'm alone, because as you can see from the site, they've change to a larger, more square graphic.
Moral of the story: human brains are good at filtering out junk. The only way they're going to get us to pay attention to ads is either 1) make us have to look at them for thirty seconds before continuing, 2) start asking quizzes about ad content before displaying real content, or 3) make them actually interesting, helpful, and naturally engaging (hah!).
That kind of thing is simple to do. You just create the popup, and then immediately check to see if it still exists, before the user could possibly have closed it. If you're even running the code at all, you must have JavaScript, but if the window doesn't exist immediately after being created, they must be blocking popups.
I write code to do this as soon as Mozilla introduced the feature, though I didn't release it for fear of misuse. I considered trying to get a patent and then sitting on it. I should have done that, and I apologize that I did not.
Non-sales sites are really going to have to realize that there will be x% of people who block ads, x% will never come back after getting 2 pop-ups in a row, and x% who don't care about your monetary worries.
I have the right to use my PC, including my browser, as I see fit. You do not have the right to make a profit. You have to earn a profit. There's no reason why anyone should be subsidizing your webpage on the mating habits of small canines. Pay for your own bandwidth. Find a decent business plan and take the first paragraph of this post into consideration. Good Luck.
Considering ad blocking software and methods are free and the commercial webserver certainly isn't who do you think is going to win? Sounds like this firm is just feeding off the fears of the dot.com collapse.
"Internet companies are going down," he said.
Yeah, its called VC money running out and not having a viable business plan. I'd like to see some proof that the small % of users who block ads are really the cause of boo.com or whomever going out of business. Something tells me there's no such proof.
I've been blocking ads for years. Not that I don't like to see ads - sometimes I really am interested in the products being offered. But such a large fraction of ads are now so visually annoying that I can't take them anymore. I don't want to punch the fscking monkey. I don't want bouncing pong balls drawing my eyes away from a software review. When I'm at work reading financial sites I don't want a huge pair of hooters trying to sell me an X10 cam - it's unprofessional in an office environment.
I prefer magazine-style ads: occasional full-page ads I can easily skip or read, smaller ads in the margins that are not intrusive. When I look at them, there they are, and when I look away, they don't pull my eyes back. The web was like this in the early days of advertising. Then the monkey-punching games and Vegas-style animations started to take over, and now we have big honking animated ads with an inch of content wrapped around them, too distracting to read the actual web page content.
On TV the commercials are clustered together, then go away so you can view a few minutes of uninterrupted program content. If TV worked like the web, you would have a commercial running in the middle 60% of the sitcom stage with the actors squeezed into the margins around it, speaking lines between the commerical's music, and ducking under other smaller commericals, all competing for your attention. How long do you think people would watch such a program?
Bring back the days of less intrusive ads and I will turn off my ad blocker.
People will have to realise that there will be X% of sites run as a public service, X% that will require you to give them money and X% that will find an indirect method of making money from viewers (like adverts).
They have the right to use their servers, including choosing who to serve pages to, as they see fit. You do not have the right to infinite free information. Pay for the information you want. Find a decent information source and take the first paragraph of this post into consideration. Good Luck.
My Journal
Supposing that the ads were hosted offsite and you couldn't efficiently check to make sure the ad was downloaded (which you can, but it might slow down page loading), you could attach the ad to a little java executable that calls home before loading the page.
At lest I think I know how the tv commercials affect my anyway. I watch some program and in the commercial hear about new improved detergent. Later when I go down to the store to buy some stuff, and I need detergent. Say that I see a couble of brands, some of them are unknown to me, but there also is the detergent I have seen commercials about. I most likely would buy the product that I at least had heard about - even though it only was trough some unbiased commerical.
The problem with Internet ads is that somewhere along the way the "interpretation" of the Internet has changed from "a big library" (rember that?) to "a big shopping mall". (At least for the banner makers.)
However, in a real shopping mall, an "on sell" sign might lure me into some speciffic shop to buy someting. This while most users don't interpreat the Internet this way - like most banner people would like to think. To the users the web is still more of a library than a shopping mall.
Have a look at:http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat_des.htm #d04
(Figures a bit old, but I think the main point still applies)
The point is that when I go to a shopping mall I went there to buy stuff, much unlike when I surf to my favourite pages. And they wonder why I find thouse blinking banner annoying? They are annoying because, most of the time, I didn't log on to buy anything.
So, to some extent I think that web ads sould be more like the tv commercials - "get this brand into your heard" kind of ad. But, the success of such ads are of course much harder to measure. Even though computer ads supposedly were to be the dream for copy writers et al. (Should be so easy to measure exposure etc etc)
Also, though it has been mentioned above, just clicking a banner on a site that I'd like to support would not help much in the long run. I'd of course have to click and buy.
--
Slashdot signature: 'Laugh assist to nerd'
Having stuff flash at me while I'm trying to read, is so annoying that I simply won't put up with it. If you use animated gifs, I'll turn of image loading. If you use Flash, I'll wait till it's finished playing. If you refuse to provide content without flashing ads, I'll go elsewhere.
Conversely, if you avoid annoying me, I'll probably let you stick around and might even pay attention to what you have to say.
There seem to be two main paridigms for online advertising, I'll call them Amazon/Google (AG) and DoubleClick (DC). AG ads are unobtrusive (static images or text), targeted (related the the webpage I requested), and informative ("Click here to purchase this book"). DC ads are intrusive (flashing), untargeted (random banners), and obscure ("We'll make you happier/sexier/richer!!"). As retailers become savvier, looking more at generated sales and less at the number of click-thrus, they'll turn more and more to AG ads. Until then, I don't care how technically sophisticated your ad-loading software gets. If it annoys me, I'll find a way to avoid it.
My policy is to unilaterally block pop-under advertisers. Not the sites that feature the ads, but the companies that provide the ads -- like iwin, doubleclick, etc. I'm able to do this through my HOSTS file, which while still allowing the window to pop-under, at least displays nothing but a blank page.
There are limitations to this method. Yahoo's "dailynews" server started popping under ads that came from straight IP addresses, something HOSTS can't block. So I was forced to label dailynews.yahoo.com as a restricted site, and disabled all forms of scripting and advanced features for that (and a few others) web server.
I have no problem with banner ads or even those new square Flash-based ads. It's motherfuckers who decide that they need to open up new windows (either over but especially under my current browser window) that get me all pissy.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Let's get something straight - I think everyone agrees with that sentiment. Some people seem to feel for moral reasons that the web should not subsist on advertising alone because it is an inherently offensive mix, the freedom of the information frontier and the crassest sort of commercialization ever.
Part of the problem is that those upholding the advertiser's point of view keep saying things like "they have a right to do it" and "if you didn't block it, we wouldn't have this problem. Stop blocking ads now!". The reality is that the only reason blocking has become even slightly common is because the ads have gotten SO much more incredibly intrusive and offensive with the obnoxious javascript toys at the disposal of the advertisers.
And why have the advertisers gotten so obnoxious? Why the move to pop-under, pop-over, run-around-my-fucking-page-chasing-my-cursor sorts of annoying ads? Because there is some sort of myth that people are supposed to click-through on ads and if we annoy the living shit out of them, they will click through. I'm sorry, clicking on ads just is terribly unlikely to ever happen and is not a meaningful metric of anything. People don't WANT to interrupt their precious time relaxing and browsing the web for information, news, pr0n or whatever to read your ad shit. Now if you were nice, showed me a banner ad and let me click to queue something up in my bookmarks or some client side info-base, I might want to come back to it later, maybe. But you should be fucking happy that I even saw your ad, glimpsed your logo and have cognizance that you exist.
As soon as your ad association in my mind goes from "oh that looks neat" to "fucking assholes make me click all over the place" I guarantee you I'm gonna go looking for blocking software and I'm sure as hell not going to have positive associations with your product (apparently these advertisers don't care and they just want any association at all). But I guarantee I will never buy anything from X10 or anybody who gives me a pop-under. Furthermore I consider it outside of my contract of usage for a site that they can force me to waste my time chasing click-unders. Give me banner ads, fine, if they are too big and take up more of my screen than the content I won't read your site, IN THE SAME WAY I'D TOSS A PAPER PUBLICATION THAT DID THE SAME. But don't abuse javascript to wreak havoc on my browser or browsing experience or I will be forced to take defensive technological measures against your hostile advertising. I'd rather not have access to your site than feel like nothing other than a click-through prostitute.
There's a reason TV has something like 4 minutes of advertising every 30 minutes - if they had any more people would shut off their fucking TVs and cancel their cable subscriptions.
Sure, it still uses bandwidth, but other than that - no harm done. Anyone who feels this strongly is *not* going to buy the product of aggresive advertisement in either case (so the advertiser loses nothing), the website gets some cash, and you save screen space.
Thoughts?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
While it may well be the case in the US that they don't have to make their sites visible to people using different settings, it's starting to become a legal issue in the UK.
As disabled people do have every right to access content, things like making a site usable with alt tags is starting to become a genuine legal issue. Telling a visually impared person that they must turn on the features that make a site physically unusable to them would be breaching equal opportunity laws. Curiously, most of the UK laws wandered out of the EU and so I'd imagine that Germany, where this company is based, is much the same.
Of course there is one other option no one seems to be looking at: "Who cares whether it'll pan out? Creating this hype will generate a lot of interest in the company and maybe help raise enough money to see us through the current downturn." A lot of companies that planned to get to IPO this year seem to be doing this at the moment. Whether or not they have a tech and whether or not it's actually viable, if you create enough talk and hype, you might still be able to get a few investors that you wouldn't have got otherwise and just maybe you'll stay in business long enough to come up with a more viable product.
>>Oh, c'mon, you really think there is a large % of people actually blocking ads? It's a small group, 10% at best.
I'm willing to wager that a person that knows how to block advertising has an income of >40K, has an e-mail list of 25 people with simular income or greater. And when discovers a new product that they like, they create HUGE buzz within their little circle. And that circle will most likely have people with the money or authority to purchase the product.
so give me a way to target them I'll do it. ( google dies it best I think )
-Onepoint
if you see me, smile and say hello.
When you make a request do download blabla.html, the web server makes a conneciton to the server that serves the ads to see if your IP address has downloaded /gci/ads?ad12345&UniqueID. If it doesn't receive a response in 30 secs, it assumes that you didn't download the ad and you don't get to download blabla.html.
This is already beeing done ...
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I have no intrinsic moral obligation to make sure that a vendor's business is profitable or is based on a viable revenue stream. The net is by default a public place. Putting up a website is the same as putting a notice up on a bulletin board. Filtering out banner ads (having your client software ignore them) is like ignoring them in wetware (which is what most people do anyway). Or zapping/muting a commercial on TV.
OTOH, putting up coercive software on the site to limit access to content is the vendor's priviledge. There is no intrinsic difference between password-protected content and this "must download the ads too" software. (I suspect that the customer response will be similar.) Your choices are: don't patronize the site, comply with the restictions, or evade the restrictions. There is no morality associated with any of these choices, it is merely a matter of market pressures and a technological arms race. (Remember, the closest ecological analogue of a vendor-client relationship is that of preador and prey. They are not your friends.)
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
You can do this purely on the server side. No cookies. No by IP address. No javascript. No Java. Possibly without even using frames.
First, with frames. Send them a tiny page with frames. A frame for the ad(s) and a frame for the content. The tiny frame containing html contains custom url's for both the content and the ads. That is, the "session id" is embedded in the url's, without using cookies.
When the browser requests the url for content, the content stream is stalled until the ads are downloaded, or at least started. Since ads and content are tied to the same "session", you can tell which content goes with which ads. But you don't penalize others behind a NAT. The server can still be load balanced because a database keeps track of the sessions -- which can be very short lived. So even multiple servers can be used, as long as they share a common database -- or some rpc mechanism to ensure evil ads have been served before "unstalling" the stream for the content.
I said do it without frames. Simply send the html stream of the main page. Ads appear in the stream before content, which almost means necessarily "above" the content. When the stream gets right up to the point where it is to start delivering content, you stall the stream until the ad image(s) are at least requested.
Possible problem: are there any browsers that cannot request the ad image while the main content page is stalled? i.e. non multi-threaded?
Possible countermeasure: when your junkbusting proxy detects ads, it must deliver fake ads to the browser (or better, rewrite the content stream so that there aren't even ad spaces in the content), and it must make a pretense of requesting ads from the server. The proxy would continue to suck down the ad images until the content is delivered -- then abruptly close the ad stream connections. This way, if the server isn't willing to unstall the content until the ads are fully delivered, all you wasted is the bandwitdh to get the ads, but you don't see them. If the server is willing to unstall the content as soon as ads are requested, then you drop the connection on the ads asap. Using such a proxy, the server is unable to detect that you didn't actually see the ads. You at least went through the pretense of downloading the ads.
I don't see any counter-counter-measure that the evil advertisers could employ. From their point of view, you are a normal browser, downloaded both the ads and content. How can they further tell that you can't see the ads without going to more invasive techniques like Javascript?
I've often wondered about using javascript to deliver the content. You send down a javascript program that writes new content into an <ilayer>. But the javascript can be obfuscated. Even the "content" can be compressed with the javascript effectively unzipping it as it writes content into the layer. This almost certianly requires real javascript running in the browser to render the content part. The javascript could attempt to detect that the ads have been rendered first.
Now the counter-counter-counter-measure. Let the javascript and rendering happen in the ad busting proxy. The proxy is designed so that its rendering engine renders a data structure in memory. You then run filters on this data structure. Pattern matching. (Lisp anyone?) It's like a regular expression, but without the same kind of syntax. You do the recognition on the final page, which is expected to be structured a certian way. The ad, which falls in a familiar place is removed, and then new html is written from the in-memory data structure rendering of the original html. The new html is sent from the proxy to the end user.
Then what about a counter-counter-counter-counter-measure? Well, the evil advertisers could start sending you the content as a java applet. The applet contacts the server via. a non http stream and gets the content through a secret non-standard means. But only if the ads were delivered.
But then the counter-counter-counter-counter-counter-measure is to run the applet in a faked environment that fools it into connecting to the server and think that the ads were deliverd on the local page.
But then the counter counter counter counter counter counter measure is to serve both the ads and content together in a single big applet which uses a proprietary non-standard means obtain both the ads and content over a special stream from the server. Any attempts to circumvent this is a violation of the DMCA. They automatically record your IP address, look up your location, and to an XMLRPC call to the local FBI office's server to send goons to your door.
Then the counter counter counter counter counter counter counter measure is to stop visiting such sites. (And to bitch and complain on slashdot.)
Then the counter*8 measure is to lobby for custom legislation that requires you to browse to their web site if you were a regular visitor before, and to watch their ads. Alternately they can send party comrads to your home to force feed you the ads.
Finally, you must download and install their TeleScreen(tm) applet which uses your computer's usb camera and microphone to give them two-way telescreen access to your home to ensure that you are watching your dialy minimum recommended allowance of ads, as determined by federal standards.
What is the counter*9 measure?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Not sure if anyone mentioned it already but Ad Muncher http://www.admuncher.com/ is the best (imo) ad blocking program out there, it doesn't hog processor(popupkiller), or crash(popupkiller), or have a terrible ui (Proxomitron), and it's not tied to any particular browser(popup-ad-filter).
The installer is 65k total, written in assembly, it uses very little memory and virtually no processor, and is extremely customizable. The "advanced filters" option lets you specify any text in the page source to be replaced on the fly and supports wildcards, it can block banner and popup servers directly and not even draw the ad or the space it would take up, and it has lots of useful options like the block images with "typical banner dimensions" option stops a lot of ads without you ever having to take the time to make a filter for a particular one.
I like to see my favorite sites do well. If that comes at the cost of a few extra K on a banner add, I'm all for it. Great. Advertisers get their "message" out (heck, sometimes I'm even interested in it). Sites get to continue operations. I get content. Everybody wins.
But there's a limit to what I'm willing to pay. Flash adds. Stupid java tricks. Exceptionly flashy or large animated gifs (a rare annoyance, thankfully). Tracking. These advertising methods get filtered.
I blame it all on DoubleClick. The emphasis on click-throughs and customer tracking / targeting seems to have come from their camp. It set an ugly precedence. Online advertising somehow now fails if it doesn't create immediate response (click-throughs) or is unable to provide targeted customer data; a standard no other advertising medium is expected to meet.
Everyone looses under this system. The advertiser, who's messages isn't seen. The end user who either has to undergo extraordinary effort to filter out offensive advertisements, or otherwise deal with intrusive ads. And the webmaster who's site looses income depending on how many of their users choose to make the effort to protect their personal rights.
I agree that advertising is necessary, but Slashdot does it right, and the advertisers seem to understand that BRAND marketing is much more important the PRODUCT marketing. That is to say since I have been reading Slashdot ThinkGeek and Rackspace are household phrases to me. When I need webhosting I will likely go to Rackspace, when I need a Netcam I will go to ThinkGeek, NOT X10. Because no matter how inexpensive X10 is, I'm sure as hell not going to reward them for annoying me. See it doesn't matter, as many have already said, if I go to your website that second and get your product, what is important is that I remember your name and associate with your products.
I think the biggest problem today is that people don't seem to understand that the phrase "any publicity is good publicity" has limitations. Those limitations specifically being don't make ME personally pissed off at you, I don't give money to people who piss me off. X10 pisses me off. The spam senders who are to lazy to type their own names and introduce themselves as "fsdfs" piss me off. Those people will never get my money. I'm sure the many thousands of Slashdotters feel the same way.
Just send a boolean "true" back whenever a server asks if a window is open or anything. Now I don't know much Javascript but are you only able to query "hey, is the window called 'bigbanner' open?" and then get a boolean true or false or is Javascript able to say "hey, give me a list of all the popups open" and you then check to see if the window called 'bigbanner' is in the list of windows returned. The second method of pop-up detection would be much harder to get around since the only possible way to avert it is to hack javascript in such a way that when window.open occurs it gets added to the list of open windows even though it does not appear. You know the more website try to push the issue the more people will want to block this stuff. I have no problem with banner ads. Even animated ones are ok by me. It is pop-ups and the javascript "punch the monkey" ads that really get on my nerves.
I'd like to address the "just view the damned ads, you freeloading hippies" crowd.
Personally, the reason I started blocking banner ads (a little over a year ago) was because of one very specific ad--that stupid "punch the monkey ad".
It managed to crap more web no-nos into an ad than I ever though possible:
At the time, it was a very popular ad. I don't know what I was typing to into Altavista to make it trigger (LaTeX->latex? Monkeys? WTF?), but I seemed to get it every five pages, and Netscape dumping core every five pages was not conducive to my finding out this LaTeX technique, which I needed right then to finish a CS paper (I'd have used Fondren Library, but this was before the Rice campus library stayed open 24 hours daily).
So, as a temporary fix, I disabled Java (I didn't need it at the time), used a different search engine (Google), got what I needed, and then installed Squid+Cameron Simpson's Ad Zapper (once I'd turned-in my paper), and the problem went away. I could have Java as I needed it (Rice's CS departmnet loves Java. Turning it off in a web browser meant not being able to do certain coursework), and my browser didn't crash because of stupid monkeys.
The clear message I'd like to deliver is I don't mind non-intrusive advertising. In fact, most banner ads are very interesting, so long as they don't flash or titter about annoyingly, and don't stupidly try (and fail) to look like dialog boxes (looks really stupid under OpenWin). Occasionally, I click one. However, if it pops up in a separate window, if it spawns things in other windows, if it creates offscreen windows, if it crashed my browser, if it litters my hard drives with cookies, if it prevents me from clicking on your page, or if it dances around like a stupid monkey, I will disable it, and I will go elsewhere.
There are probably a lot of technically-minded users that feel the same way. I don't want to steal content--I don't have this need to remove all adverts from the pages I'm viewing (although, I will strip them out, if need to print the page). But, my computer is my computer, and if your website can't sit in its window and behave itself, you've just lost a viewer.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
That's bad advertising, plain and simple. It's been _proven_ through marketing research that if you get too annoying you unsell your product, most notably that's been proven through market research of particular sorts of TV advertising.
We're not talking about 'just let these poor people make money, will you?', we're talking about enabling them to hose themselves through severely stupid and bad advertising. The people using ad blockers are doing advertisers a FAVOR- that is valuable data, that information. They often accompany this with other valuable data- announcements that "if it was all quiet well-behaved banner ads that didn't blink or flash or move a lot, we wouldn't feel compelled to be doing this". That's valuable information. Since when is a random consumer's browsing history more valuable than an outright, impassioned statement of that consumer's preferences on how they want to be courted, advertising-wise?
Intrusive web advertising can be compared to billboards: the people attempting to use it can make a big fuss about how it's a moral imperative that they should be allowed to do this, but it's not only a lie, it's not even a healthy or useful thing to be doing. They are wrong in wishing to do it. If they are allowed to do it they will actually harm advertising in general- though this does create a window of opportunity for well-behaved advertisers, as well as substantially driving down the costs for well-behaved advertisers. Still... if you don't actively hate the entire field of advertising, it's hard to justify these abusive, useless practices, which harm advertising in general.
David Ogilvy considered advertising the art of 'speaking well about' things. Abusing people to the point that they are blindly, acutely hostile to anything resembling advertising makes it that much harder to do it properly and sensibly.
Just as restrictions are placed on the use of roadside billboards, I would like to see this abusive web advertising restricted by regulation and government oversight. It's plain that these people cannot and will not behave or police themselves.
Ok, here I am, talking about advertising again.
Assuming that the software works 100% (read: it blocks content if and only if the ads weren't viewed), then it will kill advertising revenue. The reason is all about click through ratios. It goes back to my previous statements: if someone doesn't want to view ads, then they aren't gonna be clicking on ads. And if they aren't clicking on ads, then forcing them to see the ad only lowers your click through ratio. And that means that you can't charge as much for advertising as you would otherwise be able to. So your costs go up, your revenues go down, and things are bad all around.
This doesn't even address the repercussions of the simple fact that forcing your viewers to also view ads is gonna piss them the hell off.
And then there's the technology itself. I could see it done in 2 ways: java/javascript and redirected frames.
The java/javascript method would require the user to have java enabled. And if they don't have java enabled, clearly the system won't work. Trying to put up a website that doesn't work for users with java or javascript disabled doesn't work. There are far too many users out there who have them disabled. Hell, I wish all users disabled them, but that's just me.
The redirected frame would be the best way. Make the ad server serve out an HTML frame that contains a link to the graphic and another link to a 1 pixel frame on the host's server. The host's server sits there and counts the hits on this other frame, and when it reaches the right number, serves out the content. But this doesn't prevent the user from blocking the ad graphic at all. It works if the user blocks the ad frame, but doesn't prevent the user from just blocking the ad graphic.
The only way you could tell that the real graphic is actually displayed is to send out java or javascript that knows the checksums for the ads that the user is going to be served, and then compares the checksums before the real content is displayed. But once again that depends on the user having java or javascript enabled. And it also requires the ad host's webserver to be integrated with the ad network's webserver. Only really big sites can afford to do that integration, because it means that they have to own their own ad server and content server. Ad servers are highly expensive. Yes, there are freeware ad servers out there, but none of them have the speed that a high traffic site needs, or they lack reasonable targeting options.
All in all, I'd say that this new beast is going to be a miserable failure. The problem isn't that this beast exists, but that someone actually thought it would be a good idea. That means that I have to get back into the propa^H^H^H^H^Heducation war again.
-- Nolite audere delere orbiculum rigidum meum.
I didn't ask Slashdot to be freely available on my web browser. I come here because it's a neat site which started off as a hobby/fan based effort and which I visit in the same spirit.
If it can't keep going on that kind of steam, then too bad. The world won't end without Slashdot. There will always be another place to read dumb articles and dance in the mosh pit of pseudo-informed public opinion. There have been and always will be soap boxes aplenty.
In any case, the net is SUPPOSED to be adaptive and dynamic.
But seriously, and this may sound Machiavellian, but if you are smart and savvy, you will ALWAYS be able to surf for free, both on-line and through life in general. Is this wrong? Is it leeching? You bet it is! That's the state of things in this reality. Every time you sit down to eat, something or several somethings have died for your consumption. The JOB of each and every spirit is to figure out how to exist in this reality with ease, grace and as much benevolence as possible.
Part of this learning process requires that you spend a miserable amount of time in the trenches learning from your mistakes. If 90% of the Web-faring populace makes the Web free and easy for the remaining 10%, and would do so regardless of my or anybody else's actions, then it would not benefit anybody to not take advantage of their behavior.
Where Greed DOES become a force in the negative, is when you actively withhold information. I'm certainly not going to keep the techniques of ad-blocking a secret from the masses for my own benefit; I explain the concept of ad blocking to everybody I meet. I tell them it's rewarding and easy to learn. Anybody who seeks further help, I take the time to describe to them the process. Of course, most poeple don't pursue this knowledge. This is directly linked to Karma (the non-digital kind which most of the shmucks here don't believe in), most people will simply not pursue higher knowledge until they have properly learned the lessons at whatever level they're currently at. And that's how it's supposed to be.
In any case, if one day the web becomes ruined because everybody has figured out how to block ads, (as if THAT'S at all likely), then fine. The Web's time will have come. The world will move on and adapt and be dynamic. And the 10% who are aware will quickly rise to the top of whatever new paradigm takes its place. Change is both healthy and ultimately, unavoidable. Stagnancy is death; luckily both are just illusions.
Everything is just a lesson in the end.
-Fantastic Lad
Actually that's not far off. These god damned banner ads that that flicker make me worry I'm going to have a seizure or something. Whoever makes those should be shot.
what product does a news site offer? /. offer?
/. announces that they've been told that they must increase their ads revenue.
what product does
what product does google offer?
they're all services. you do to use their sites. the only money that they can get back in return from the money that they spend such that you can use their site is by banner ads. I'm not saying that's their product, but I am saying that that is the only way that they are going to make any sort of money. readership on the net doesn't pay bills. popup ads and clickthrus do. If a site is sufficiently big enough and their normal ads scheme isn't working because of either insufficient readership or too much readership or people blocking ads then the powers that be will do what they must do in order to increase revenue.
Don't forget that it's not only rising costs but lower ad revenue simply because the advertisers are paying less now than they were before and the advertisers are demanding more intrusive advertisements. Some websites simply have no choice but to increase the obtrusiveness of their advertisements because otherwise they'd be out of business due to changing prices in either hosting or ad based revenue.
I wonder how you'll feel when
And lastly don't forget that things are dominated by one thing : money. If you can make more money by doing this, they you'll do it. Very simple concept.
So I'm curious then. How do you justify the bandwidth that you use off the sites which ads you block? They're paying so that you can get free content and you don't even have the curtosey to view the ads so that they can pay their bills?
Sounds a lot like the MP3 "I buy more after I try!" talk that I hear a lot of. There is absolutely no evidence to proove that most people who listen to MP3s buy more CDs than before, and a lot of evidence that prooves the contrary... Increasing overall CD sales doesn't proove that at all. Someone posted a good comment on one of the other threads that said something along the lines of either :
a) pay for the CDs and give the artists what they're due
-or-
b) don't listen to their music.
This is the same thing. You are incurring them a cost by viewing their content that they are providing to you free of charge with the only request that you view advertisements so that they can pay their bills. How do you justify blocking those ads? If you don't like their advertising scheme then perhaps you should not be visiting their site.
Sorry if I seem a little bitter here, but I'm getting tired of the hypocrisy in general (not aimed at you).
If God gave us curiosity
tolerate the ads (what do they cost you anyway?!).
Bandwidth, time. I've found that its usually the ADS that keep the page from loading and finally displaying.
Your arguement is stupid. Does anyone feel obligated to sit through tv commercials? Should we change everyone down so that they do?
Besides, this software 'weapon' won't work. As soon as they figure out that maybe the reason the correct number of ads didn't display was b/c the image server timed out, or the user hit the stop button. Besides, the page loads first, before the images...so i don't see how it could work.
Yup - I already paid for the content and so has everyone else.
I paid a monthly fee to my ISP. My ISP has paid a HUGE monthly fee to the Telephone company and my Telephone company has paid an even larger fee to each backbone carrier they connect to.
If some of that money is not making it into the hands of those who create web content - then perhaps we should ask why. It is my pet peeve of course.
In economic terms - the flow of money is opposite the flow of goods and services. But in the net we have this situation.
Content:
website -> uplink -> backbone -> downlink -> ISP -> websurfer
Money:
website -> uplink ? backbone -< downlink -> ISP -> websurfer
It isn't the backbone who is the culprit here. It is the system where the telephone carrier is willing to pay the backbone operators for the connection because they need content and have no choice... but these same companies are typically unwilling to pay the websites that supply the same commodity. What difference does it make to a telephone company where the content comes from? If they are willing to pay say Sprintlink for bandwidth which supplies content - then why not the website operator in their neck of the woods? If the local webmaster's content weren't valuable then people wouldn't click on his website!
This creates the situation where Telstra (an Australian telco) pays for Australian content being delivered off USA hosting companies but at the same time Telstra is unwilling to pay an Australian company to provide content. Why an Australian company would be willing to pay Americans but not Australians is a good question to ask.
Of course - were Telstra to pay Australians for the content they create - then the question remains whether Americans or anyone else would be willing to pay Telstra for the opportunity to connect for the Australian content that Telstra thusly makes available.
Classic monopoly/oligopoly IMHO. Sometimes terribly unfair things get entrenched. It can be changed and there are questions in my mind how many laws are being broken. (1) copyright. Caching proxies dupicate content and this is specifically against copyright law. (2) Fair trade practices. Sometimes deals are offered to some content suppliers.. Microsoft? Yahoo? Thompson newspapers in Canada? but not to anyone else. (3) Anti competitive trade practices. IE - if we can trade shares then we can do business... Otherwise forget it. (that was the "convergance" theme wasn't it - between the telecomunication industry and the newspaper industry).
If the chicken farming industry worked the same way then every egg farmer would have to sign a contract with a retailer in order to get his eggs on the market. If retailers were given this much market clout then (1) there would be a shortage of eggs and (2) they would be a lot more expensive. Finally (3) Barriers to entering the chicken farming business would be way to steep for most chicken farmers.
No brands are mentioned here as I don't want to be knocked for spamming slashdot. I'm not. It's a concept in shopping and a note to advertisers. Put your product online. Be competitive. Let consumers find you. (Hey X10, how does your product stand in the reviews of wireless cameras?) Smart shoppers do the homework.
The truth shall set you free!
Its use on Mind's Eye is sensible and inoffensive, with a view toward providing options rather than depriving them. If someone wants to read the story for free, he has to view the banner ads. If he wants to buy it cheaply, he can do so without them.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
...as long as they continue to elect the make use of the plain-text design of the display protocol and open architecture of the transport, they get what they deserve.
So when you buy a CD, because it is an open standard (no encryption, etc.), it's OK for you to make copies of the CD for your friends? No, that's called stealing. This about the law and ethics not about technical countermeasures. The RIAA adopts rights-infringing copyright protection on their CD's because of people like you. You think, "if it's technically easy to get, then it's mine". This philosophy warrents serious self examination.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
You don't have to pay for it, you choose to pay for it. Believe it or not, you could survive without broadband. You could probably survive with no internet connection whatsoever. But you choose not to.
The DSL providers gouge you because they know there are two kinds of people: people who don't want DSL at any price, and people who desperately want DSL. There are very few people who kinda-maybe-want-DSL-but-not-if-it-costs-more-than -$10-a-month. So why would they charge $10 a month when they can charge $80 a month and have nearly the same number of customers? :%s/DSL/crack/g
do i give a damn if the .coms don't get their .000005 cent for an ad banner display that i am never ever going to see or click, yet steals *my* bandwidth and even attempts to identify *me* with their stupid cookies?
What part of "HTTP GET request" don't you understand? Your computer is asking their computer for information. Their computer is providing that information. Their computer is asking your computer to store a cookie. Your computer is complying. At what point are they stealing your bandwidth? If you don't want them to send you information, don't send them an HTTP GET request!