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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."
Webwasher from http://www.webwasher.com/ has been doing it for years. It acts as a proxy between your browser (any browser) and the internet. It do pattern matching and image size matching then remove those elements from webpages before your browser get them.
BTW For Mozilla/Firebird, the adblock extension is a more flexible solution then the "Block images from server" feature, as it can do pattern matching base on URL, more info from here: http://adblock.mozdev.org/
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
I can't speak for Symantec, but I can speak for AdBlock - an extension for Mozilla Firebird. The content still gets downloaded, but you don't see it. In fact, you can chose to leave the empty space, or have it hide the empty space. It works with regular expressions, so you have complete and total control over what you see and what you block. _Complete_ (Oh yeah, and nothing gets blocked unless you ask it to block something.)
Maybe I'm just not seeing it, but I'm running NAV 2004 and not only do I not have banner blocking, but there is certainly nothing in the options to enable or disable it, nor is there any mention of it in the options anywhere that I can find.
Makes me curious if there was another version of the program featuring banner-blocking after I purchased mine -- which would of course be typical.
If banner ads fail, more and more sites will be forced into a pay model, and the days of the "Free Internet" will be almost over.
The author must be new to the internet. If you go back to the good old days, for example when Yahoo used to be at yahoo.stanford.edu, there were no banner ads. Guess what, the internet was free then.
To claim that the loss of banner ads will automatically lead to the loss of a non-free internet is to ignore history and to show a lack of imagination. Banner ads are only a 1994 invention, they aren't an intrinsic part of either the internet or the world wide web.
"Interstitial" Web ads are ones you see when you click from the main page of a site to an article page and, instead, you see a whole-page ad you must click past to get to the page you wanted to see.
This is one of many online ad styles you're likely to see becoming more popular if enough people start using ad blocking software to make a noticeable difference in commercial site ad revenues.
Yahoo Hong Kong is already selling them: See what they look like here.
- Robin
Privoxy (formerly known as JunkBuster) has been doing this very successfully for years now.
And it does it to the scale of your entire network (since you integrate it with your proxy server) and with any browser you can possibly think of.
That link again for people who missed it is: Privoxy
Can't recommend it strongly enough... nor agree with Improv more. 8)
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
Then in essence this software is rewritting a copyrighted work without permission of the copyright holder, is it not?
But you're allowed to do that, provided the modified work is for your own private enjoyment. It's not illegal to doodle in the margins of a book you've purchased, is it?
This assumes a willful act on the part of the consumer to enact those modifications, though. If this software is pre-installed and activated, before the consumer ever gets to touch the computer, that could be a gray area.
Two things: 1.) The AD-blocking feature has been in NAV since at least 2002, and I have been using since then. 2.) As the parent suggests that it is something that is automatically installed and turned on, he is wrong. While your computer may come with NAV pre-loaded, the AD-blocker feature is turned off by default, at least it always has been on my installs. I don't see the Ad-blocker as some threat the internet. I use it with Mozilla Firebird and it really cuts down on the crap that clutters websites. Personally, I view web ads a step above spam. My opinion is that if you can put ads on your website, I am allowed to completely ignore the ads, and if I want block them. IMHO once the data from your website hits my computer I can do whatever I feel like to it locally - so I don't see the problem. Now, if I agreed to view ads in order to use your service, the case would be different, but with most websites I never agreed to use your service with ads, so I feel like I have no reason to generate revenue for you by clicking on your ads (or even viewing them).
Running banner ads is a stupid way to go these days. PEOPLE ARE SICK OF THEM. I will only run Google's ads on my websites as banner ads are obtrusive and obnoxious. Any site that uses them... Well, you're gonna go the way of the steam engine. People are sick of it.
People know ad revenue is needed to run sites, but a lot of them I know won't tolerate annoying banner ads (or worse still, Flash ads) anymore and have asked me to hook them up with ad blocking software, which I gladly do.
The article does indeed say that, but the article is just plain wrong. Not only is it not enabled by default, it is not even present. That feature is part of Norton Personal Firewall 2004, not Anti-Virus. I havn't tried that software, but from the description of its features, it doesn't sound like it is on by default.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Norton offers Flash blocking also.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey