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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."
Symantec isn't making the choice to block the ads, the consumer who buys the product and allows the ads to be blocked is the one making the choice. The choice is still very much in the consumer's hand unless Symantec is somehow physically forcing their users to enable or make use of the feature or their product.
So what, Slashdot is now Symantec technical support?
This ability had been around for years with many products? What makes you think that specific product will revolutionize revenue generation on the net?
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
If the ads are worth seeing people will disable the feature, if they aren't find a better revenue model. Provide a service worth paying for. Norton seems to have figured this idea out, instead of creating a ad sponsored anti-virus product they create a product people are willing to pay for.
I wonder why we as consumers have some kind of "responsiblity" for accepting the advertising that marketers foist upon us. I, for one (And I'm sure there are many here) remember the Internet before it was commercial, and before there were shysters trying to convince me that advertising is what creates the medium. That's just not true. Advertising is a parasite that sits on top of a succesfull communications medium, not a creator of such mediums. I would argue that marketing and advertising are naturally agnostic to the creation of new communications mediums ... deriding them as being "not up to snuff" until individuals make those mediums successfull .... which then tempts the advertising community to engage and use those mediums ... several years down the road attempting to state that it is advertising itself that makes those means of communications succesfull. When will it all end!
The internet may be in its teens, but banner ads are younger still. Content on the net was free before the ads, it will be free after the ads. There may not be as much free content, but I sincerely doubt that the real quality stuff will disappear.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
You run a website, it's your job to figure out the
funding. Those of us who dislike ads (probably 98% of the planet) will do our best not to see them,
and the more technically inclined among us WILL block your ad, and the business-savvy subset of
those will sell that setup, in some form, to the rest. If websites can't live without it, tough.
If they find another way to get funds, wonderful, but your funding is, to me, a black box that we shouldn't need to think about. I'm perfectly happy spending some time fiddling with Internet Junkbuster or Privoxy to cut out web ads, and tweaking my mail filters to remove advertisements from yahoo mailing lists if I get good results.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
By installing the ad blocking software. He doesn't want ads. Your buisness depends on them? Tough. It isn't his job to make your buisness model work. We hate it when the MPAA and RIAA try and force their buisness model on people, but slashdot editors think its somehow better when its on the internet? I don't think so.
You want to make money on the web? Sell something the people want. Give them a reason to pay. Extra content, early access, better content. Sell t-shirts. But don't expect the consumer to support your buisness model when it fails. And advertising on the web has failed- its ineffective, it generates no revenue for the advertisers, and its just fucking annoying.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
So, how do you propose to pay for web hosting and bandwidth?
A good webhosting provider will run $1/month/100MB of space, and $1-$2/GB of transfer. If they're charging less, don't expect any sort of reliability.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
before this rhetoric of 'it USED to be free' goes too much further, i would hasten to remind you that the internet was NEVER free. .com happened, and before the web happened, and especially before spam, popups, and even tasteful ads, but it was never free.
it costs money to run phone lines, buy routers, hire geeks, maintain hubs, etc.
the fact that these costs were subsidized by the public and/or private universities, such that you never saw them, or were directly affected by them, does not remove this fact.
now, i'm not going to argue that it wasn't nice before
stored on computers from birth to the grave
Yeah, right. Then you can sue anyone using lynx or a VT100 terminal! Also, sue anyone with a computer incapable of displaying more than 256 colors, since clearly that has altered the intended true color look of the site. You used Mozilla??? Sue!!! That site clearly said "Designed for IE 6.0"!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
But when a banner abuses it's animation capabilities or tries to become a popup, I draw the line. If a banner isn't animated, there's a chance I might even click on it.
The free market is a very successful system. However, it is imperfect: it assumes that everyone acting selfishly will accomplish the common good, which sets up prisoner's dilemma problems.
In this case, nobody likes banner ads, and everyone selfishly wants to block them. If everyone did this, content on the web would be diminished, because fewer people could afford to produce web content full-time, and more content would go to subscriber-pay sites. (Or worse, the advertising will become more embedded and harder to filter out, even visually. For example, this sentence is brought to you by the good people at State Farm. Or every web comic would suddenly have a character named Cisco.) Yet if everyone co-operated by not blocking banner ads, free web content is made available to everyone.
And don't give me a lot of crap about "someone will figure out a better business model", unless you can actually point to a particular website with that model, that is succeeding.
All I'm saying is, think about the unintended consequences before you act selfishly, or praise others for doing so.
Which leads me to another point: there's an appalling lack of ethical behavior on the internet. Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so.
[end rant]
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
None of these methods are perfect, but they can help avoid your banner ads and other web site features from being blocked.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
...the only sure way to do it is to make people pay if they want to access your content.
Plain and simple. Advertising has always been and will forever be a inherently unstable way to earn money. If you want to be sure you'll make money, you have to actually charge for something.
ObStupidQuestion: So you think slashdot should just go pay only then? Depends on what the people running slashdot want to do. It's big enough on it's own, and part of a big enough family of properties, and the staff seems to be on the small end, so they can probably make do with ad-based stuff. And if this kind of ad blocking technology gets popular enough, the clever people that created the site are more than clever enough to get around ad blockers. And frankly, the quality index oof comments would jump through the roof if it was made pay only. Would I pay? Nope. I come here because it's free, and if it suddenly wasn't, I doubt my life would be any poorer for not surfing this place a few times a day.
So, whould you pay for slashdot? Or whould take their bandwith bill should OSDN decide it's becoming to expensive to support?
You are right when you say that advertising does not create the medium, but you will either pay for the medium yourself or have the advertiser to pay for it. The choice is yours, but advertising is not a parasite, but has a normal place in the 'food-chain' of the internet.
It's not really different from the other media. Want commercial free TV? Pay for it. Want free television, get commercials. (With several shades of gray inbetween).
If you can't support your site you should do either one of three things -
shut down the site
change to a different plan that is cheaper
beg off your readers for money
Sites that don't have ads and provide good content to their readers tend to be quite successful at the third. a radiohead site had to raise money recently to pay server costs, and this was successful. Why? Because the site provides an enormous amount of value to its readers.
I, too, remember the Internet as it was. It wasn't nearly as comprehensive a resource as it is now, and people could not reasonably use it as their sole daily news source, as they can today.
The fundamental problem is that people who create things on the net as their full-time jobs need to somehow get paid for the effort. Banner ads are not perfect, but so far nobody has found anythiing better to balance the needs of users with those of advertisers.
Once the Internet becomes more than a purely amateur medium, it requires the elements of professional publication, and one of them is ads. It's either that or pay, and I think those who complain most vociferously about banner ads are the least likely to fork out real bucks for content.
D
Do I like banner ads? Not particularly? Do I like TV ads? Even less. Why do I 'tolerate' one and not think about the other? Because I have 'geek cred' and I can claim that I used the internet back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the internet was free of advertising. But look at how TIVO is forcing television to rethink its marketing strategies. More and more shows (24, Alias, among others) are going to "commercial free" episodes and putting the ads right in the show itself (Macs for the good guys, Linux for the bad guys ;) The consumer doesn't mind because the advertising is more subtle; the ad has gone from "Mom's who know, use JIF" to "Sydney Bristow uses Peter Pan peanutbutter."
;) so they can advertise to me. Without that, I would have to pay to read the newspaper. Of course, I COULD just go to the library and read the print edition for free, or rely on one of you folks (!!!) to manually re-type it everyday (copyright violation anyone??). Anyway, without ads, consumers wouldn't have much of the content we take for granted. While SOME of us will pay for the content (just like SOME of us pay for the newspaper), advertising allows those of us who don't want to pay for it (or those of us who can't afford to pay for it) to get the content for free.
If technology causes banner ads to go away, then good riddance, but I don't think we, as consumers would really want advertising to go away. It's what keeps the internet free. Why can I read the Chicago Tribune online? Because I give them my email address (or at least AN email address
For the same reason, the airwaves are free, the internet is free. But for advertising (which keeps it free) or subscriptions neither would exist.
In sum, if I were a webmaster or internet-based company who was faced with the prospect of my ads being taken away without my consent, I'd start looking at legal action in the vein of 'tortious interference with contract' among others; for example, all of the 'deep linking' and 'frames' cases of a few years ago about 'forcing advertising' onto others.
No, I shouldn't. Thats like saying just because I go into Best Buy and do some window shopping, I'm required to give them money. Once again- it is not my job to enforce your buisness model. You are free, if you wish, to find a technical way to block those who do not view your ads. THat would be enforcing your buisness model. I don't think it would work, I think the vast majority of people would just find the service/information you supply elsewhere. But you're free to try.
This is just like the Do Not Call list, or the "skipping commercials is theft" idiocy. We, the consumers, have the right to take steps with our own property (telephones, computers, bandwidth we pay for) to stop practices that annoy us. You do not have the right to stop us from doing so. You have the right to deny us your content if we do so, but you do not have the right to force your buisness model down our throats.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I think this is great. My private screen is not a public billboard. I also have a strict policy that I do not buy products or services if they are advertised to me by intrusive means.
If I want to buy something, I will read about it in books, magazines and/or on the Internet. I will make my decision based upon independent analysis. If there are three different brands of doobrie on the market, all three manufacturers are going to say I should buy theirs, so the adverts are largely irrelevant. Instead, I will try to find out about several other people's experiences of each, taking note of their expectations and requirements, before making a decision. It sounds like a complicated process, but try describing to someone how you catch a cricket ball!
I certainly don't see how it does anyone any harm if I don't see an advertisement for a product I was never going to buy. Advertisers often say they know half of the money they spend on advertising is wasted, but they would like to know which half. Well, I can tell them for free; it's the half that includes whatever they're spending advertising to me.
Any site that sends me an advertisement I don't like, I block in my Squid as a matter of routine; and I avoid popups by having my Konqueror set to prompt me whenever a site tries to open a window using JavaScript.
I feel no compunction for the advertisers. They are parasites, stealing the bandwidth I have paid for. If a mosquito flies harmlessly around me, I have no right to harm it; but the instant it tries to drink my blood, it has indicated to me that I have a right to take any necessary action against it.
I also feel that people might well be willing to pay a small premium for advert-free surfing pre-configured by their ISP. Although I have been offering this service myself for awhile, just for cost-of-call, via my unofficial dialup line!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Then they can turn it off.
Lets face facts- advertisements are annoying. Thats why 60 million Americans signed up for the do not call list. Thats why so many people ALREADY block popups and images. Hell, its one of the reasons mozilla became popular- it blocked ads. SO, given all this- do you really think the very many people will be upset that it blocks ads? No- they're going to be estatic. Come on- do you really think that if you went to a guy on the street and asked if he wanted the ads back he'd say yes?
So the webmasters will have the same problem the RIAA and the MPAA have had. They deserve the same answer- fix your buisness model. Just like the **AA, they'll probably start by trying to block access to those who use it. But don't expect that to work too well, just like DRM isn't working for the **AA. Webmasters will adapt, or die out.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
If I were a Bastard Web Designer, I would respond to this trend by building my sites in Flash, with HTML used only as a bare-bones wrapper for delivering the Flash files.
Content and advertising would be so deeply integrated that it would be IMPOSSIBLE to view one without the other (or at least much much more difficult).
Take that, Slashjerks! And remember, to the average user, the bells and whistles of Flash are a GOOD thing, not a bad thing.
Advertising doesn't create the medium, nor the content, but it darn well supports them.
I work for a web site that derives the bulk of its revenue from advertising? That salary goes to pay the salaries of about 30 employees and for the bandwidth from about 3 billion pageviews a year.The advertisers pay the couple of million dollars a year it costs to run our site.
If you remove the advertising, you remove our site from the internet, because we're darn well not about to work full time for free, plus tap our wallets to pay for the bandwidth you're using.
There is an implicit agreement between publishers and readers. We'll provide you content you deem valuable, and in return for that value, you'll view ads. You can gloss over them, don't even have to pay attention to them, but they have to pass in front of your eyeballs along with our content.
If you pay for your net access and just want to e-mail with friends, chat on IRC, post messages on newsgroups, and access personal web sites, you should never ever have to see an ad. You're paying your ISP for the bandwidth and no one else is having to pay for the content you're enjoying.
But if you want a free mail account with Hotmail or Yahoo, want to read content on professionally produced web sites, watch streaming video, etc., you must either be willing to pay subscription fees or suffer through some banners. For many sites, a subscription model doesn't work for any number of reasons.
If you use blockers to remove banners from content it is costing someone else money to produce and deliver to you, it is not the advertising that is a parasite. You are the parasite.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Here's the deal: Ads are dead. I surf an ad-free internet, thanks to the Proxomitron and some nice custom filters, and I will continue to do so. I have no desire or inclination to see your ads. If this upsets you as a web provider, tough shit. You cannot control my side of the connection. It is not within your power, and frankly I don't give a damn about what you want.
If you want to make money from your website, then give me a reason to give you money. I'll gladly buy products from you, if they're good products and I like and want to own them. But don't stick ads on your page. I'll simply eliminate them on my end of the connection. And more and more people will do this as time goes on. Advertising as revenue is not a good means of income in the long run. If that's all you've got, then you will fail.
Fact: the internet was never "free". Someone always pays the bills. If you want to serve your content, then you're the one picking up the check. If you want me to offset that, then you'll have to find something other than ads, because I refuse to play that game. Take donations, sell coffee mugs, whatever you like. But don't expect me to view ads. I'm not going to do it and I don't give a damn about your business model depending on it.
If you don't like it, well, that's your problem.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Have you seriously _ever_ clicked on a banner?
You don't have to have click-through on an ad banner for it to be effective marketing.
There's no reason web advertising should be judged any differently than print advertising -- if people just look at it and end up with an increased awareness of the product or service being advertised, that ad is successful. The reason banner ads were so overvalued during the dot-com boom and subsequently declared a "failure" is that advertisers had dollar signs in their eyes, expecting web marketing to result in immediate sales. People don't normally make purchasing decisions that way.
What are you selling? Okay, why isn't IT paying the bills? Having 50% of your revenues come from banner ads is not going to be viable forever.
The internet was not then, and will never be, free. Somebody has to pay for all the servers and routers and wires, not to mention the dedicated writers and editors if you want quality content. In the early days of the net, the cost of operation was covered by donations from the government, universities, and large companies, supplemented by a lot of "stolen" labor time, under the management radar. The net has long since outgrown this mode of existence.
That's not to say that advertising is a good or viable way to pay those bills, merely to point out that there's no way back to Eden.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
You're an ungrateful sh*thead.. it isn't about making money, it's about trying to break even doing something you love. You've obviously never run a site that's gotten popular (and by popular I mean 20k+ uniques a day) and have been forced to shut it down as there was just no way to finance it.
And as it sits now, donations aren't nearly as commonplace as they should be. Go donate to your favorite site, and do it NOW!
Here, here. I wouldn't bother to block ads if it weren't for the inane stupid tricks advertisers try to use. The onslaught of Flash ads was the final straw. I now use Privoxy at work and home.
I like Google's take on advertising - and Privoxy leaves these alone. Its a shame that Symantec's product doesn't.
Considering your "tough shit" attitude, I'd be willing to help write an Apache module that detects IPs who view my pages but not my ads, and block those IPs for an hour or so. Don't like it if I don't want you to view my content without viewing my ads? Tough shit. (Yeah, maybe you set up Proxomitron to render the ads but not actually *display* them... which is fine by providers, because the ad impression is still counted. Unfortunately, most ad blockers don't do this.)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
There is an implicit agreement between publishers and readers
if I may paraphrase: a fool and his money are soon parted when they believe an implicit agreement binds them.
bottom line - if you want people to pay for your content, then how about an explicit agreement for them to fork over bucks for it? Oh, because you'll finally find out out that the majority of people out there don't think reading your site daily is worth $5 a month - guess what, that's because it isn't.
An implicit agreement is either a con-job, or outright bunk - and if you believe it, you're the one who is conning yourself.
Go ahead and have your "tough shit" attitude. That's fine.
Take it with you when you leave Slashdot. Who do you think pays the bills on OSDN sites: right. A LOT of advertising. Oh, don't like that? Still want to share your comments?
F*cking leave asshole.
It would end up costing you more in the end if you tried to block the blockers by checking to see if they downloaded your ads too. Those such as myself who block ads to decrease pageload time and reduce stress would simply switch to filters that fake it. So you would be wasting bandwidth sending me ads I never see.
Yeah, maybe you set up Proxomitron to render the ads but not actually *display* them... which is fine by providers, because the ad impression is still counted. Unfortunately, most ad blockers don't do this.
So it's not okay to filter ads, but it is okay for you to lie to your upstream advertisers about the effectiveness of the ads because the impression is still technically counted? That's rich.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Jesus, did the Slashdot editors go through and downmod all "screw the advertising" posts and mod up the "it sucks but we need it" posts?
99% or posters on this topic have basically said "Advertising sucks, any site that can't live without it should cease to exist". Yet all the highest modded posts tell us to grin and bear it, with two or three dozen "what have you smoked today" responses.
I don't often suspect the Slashdot editors of tampering with moderation, but this seems a tad too fishy...
Just to stay on-topic...
Once upon a time, I didn't bother blocking ads. When each site (not page) had a single, unobtrusive banner ad at the top of the main page, I dealt with it, and sometimes even clicked the banner.
Now, every site has three or four ads per page, often in horribly garish colors, that flash and move around (and in many cases, try to outright trick unwary viewers into clicking by looking like a Windows dialog). Some even have sound that you can't just ignore. Some cover the actual text you want to view. Though I personally disabled popups over a year ago, this evening I had the joyous opportunity to browse without that feature on a friends PC, and it amazes me people can stand to visit the web at all with popups... Simply unbelievable how numerous and annoying they have gotten!
Around the time X10 became a household joke among geeks, I set up a 50k hosts file. Now I also have a rather paranoid usercontent.css file.
Many people have made a valid point - Advertisers and content providers have an uneasy alliance that allows both to survive. Both need to realize, however, that unlike TV where the advertisers have a captive audience, on the web we will block their crap if it annoys us too much. This means the advertising doesn't work, and the content providers go under. Bad for everyone involved.
So I'll make a deal with advertisers (and those dependant on them) everywhere, right now - Go back to unobtrusive single-banner-per-main-page ads, and I'll view your annoyances. Piss me off with motion and sound and obscuring the actual content, though, and you guarantee that I'll do everything in my power to block your ads, up to and including never visiting an otherwise "cool" site again if I can't block the ads.
It might be worth pointing out that not only does Google do all this right - but they have always plainly labled their ads. Some site's ideas of text ads were to mix it in to the search content. I believe everyone is pretty straight forward now - but it took legal threats to get some on board. Google was there from day one.
Sure, if you want to go back to the days of web sites with little real content outside of a few technically oriented sites, GOPHER servers, and FTP sites, yay.
The fact is that the modern web puts at your fingertips a plethora of information that used to never be available nearly as quickly or as concicely. Entertainment, education, news, information.
For the bandwidth to be paid for -- for the people who spend their time to produce this content to be provided a living wage -- and to make it worth their while to provide these kinds of content to the masses at zero direct cost outside of a 'net connection -- funding has to come from somewhere. That funding, currently, comes in the form of advertising. Subscription-based models generally do not work except for the most popular websites.
Internet advertising in the last few years failed because of the fallacy of the click-through ratio. Banner ads were deemed effective judged on how many people clicked them compared to total impressions. Only in the last year, maybe less, have advertisers started to accept that these statistics are as meaningless as judging the effectiveness of a billboard on how many people veer off the road at that exact second to go buy a new Porsche SUV.
The big question, then, is not a question of illegal vs. illegal. It's a question of what's worth it to you, as a consumer. I have no problem with banner advertisements or interstituals -- sure sometimes they're annoying, but they're a fact of life. Just like those "special advertising sections" in magazines that you start to read and take three paragraphs before you realize you're not reading a real article. Pop-up and pop-under ads I find unacceptably interfering with my daily life (like telemarketing calls), and I block those as a tiny little form of civil disobedience.
Blocking all ads, though, is a different issue entirely. It is most definitely theft, in a way, but worse than that, if made too widespread, it threatens the very nature of the MODERN web.
So, if you want to go back to pre-1994 days, when you could get on USENET and make fun of Prodigy and AOL "lusers" and brag all about your new *NIX server at the university with two dial-in lines that always seem busy, so be it.
I like the web the way it is today. A little flashier, a little more annoying, but infinitely more useful.
And like all other good things, a few greedy freeloaders is all it takes to screw it up for everyone else.