Slashdot Mirror
Norton Antivirus 2004 Ad Blocking - Tough Call?
"Now of course this is a sensitive case as, like most sites around, we get most of our revenues from the banners we sell to advertisers. In fact, we get over 50% of our revenues from these banners and many other big sites, like Google, have an even bigger share of their revenues from the banners. Google's AdWords are not spared and, in fact, with ad blocking enabled, I can't even access our AdWords account as the link to access it is 'Advertise with us' on the main page, probably blocked because of the word 'advertise'.
Now, of course nobody likes banners, but for many sites it is a large part of or the only means of revenue and so there is a fragile balance that is at stake. I hate banners, but without them my company has much less revenues, both from less cashflow from advertisers as well as clients, as we depend a lot on Google's AdWords capacity to bring us clients who are specifically searching for what we sell.
Norton Antivirus 2004 now comes bundled with a lot of new PCs, and I saw the problem on many of our clients with new PCs as well as some of our sales representatives, who have a hard time selling a product our potential clients do not see advertised anywhere.
So I'm asking to all you webmasters around what's at stake here and the potential repercussions. I know that for us it will be disastrous if NAV 2004 gains too much popularity and its ad blocking software is used by millions of people. It would mean our corporate clients would not see our banners or ads, our consumer clients would not find us and would not see the banners of our corporate clients, who would then not pay us because they'd be paying for something too many people can't see. We already have some of our clients threatening us to cancel their contracts with us if we don't fix this.
This also brings, in my opinion, the subject of spam and general Internet advertising. While banners are not spam, they're almost as hated, especially those that pop right in our screens and move around with flashy graphics. But where does the limit stand between what we can do with the net and the user experience that we'd all like to have? Of course the Internet still has a lot of grounds to make, still being a mere teen, especially in the capacity of consumers spending money to buy something on a product they already spent a lot of money. Banners are the downside of having a lot of content for free as we pay for it by being annoyed by people who want to sell us stuff instead.
But what could be done instead if users are sufficiently annoyed by banners to request such a tool, as was probably the case considering that ad blocking is automatically enabled in NAV 2004? Web sites need revenues and the consumers are not ready to pay for it, largely because of the natural impoverishment imposed by increasing technologies. Buying a computer now means paying for the hardware, the software, the Internet connection, the gizmos, the subscriptions to sites and of course the upgrades, all of which were not expenses 20 years ago."
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> So what, Slashdot is now Symantec technical support?
Reading between the lines, it's even funnier: "So what, Slashdot is now the support mechanism for some webmaster who's pissed that his customers block ads?"
Not just "What the fuck?", thats "What the fuck, what the fucking fuck fuck?"
Putting little black circles in front of things doesn't make them "research".
your an ass
my an ass?
It do pattern matching and image size matching then remove those elements from webpages before your browser get them.
Is there a similar product that strip out verb conjugation? It look like my machine might have such a system installed.
You're so right. I hate all these scummy programs that mangle a site's content. Like that evil program Mozilla, taking someone's beautiful, solid stream of HTML codes and unlawfully maniuplating it into tables, replacing img tags with images, changing colors, etc. It's criminal. Somebody sue under the DMCA or something, it's completely destroying what the purpose of the internet is!
OK, back to reality. These programs aren't manipulating the content on an internet site. Their hosted data is staying the same. How you chose to render that published data is up to you. It might include text-based browsing, graphically enabled browsing, just displaying key areas (maybe from a search result), or, yes, removing ads.
Putting little black circles in front of things doesn't make them "research".
Yeah, but I wanted to be REAL convincing.
Did it show?
Though your post makes some sense - I dont completely agree with the "this sentance brought to you by State Farm" I think that most ads will (are?) going to become really insidious - think about that targeting sound speaker they want to put into coke vending machines.
I don't like adds either.
I also don't like subtracts or divides, but exponents are fine by me.
Technically, a ratio of 0:0 isn't balanced -- it's undefined, since you're dividing by zero.
An even better idea would to use software that tracks down the user to his home, or whatever those motherfuckers at the RIAA do. Once you have the address, send a team of "advertisers" with baseball bats to make "a direct appeal" to the customer's head until he caves in and purchases something. Far more effective and profitable.