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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."
Banners make the web work. they're unintrusive, small, and sometimes actually useful(especially if targeted). Banner support supports many web sites. Popups and such are a nusiscance and are bad, but i have no problem with banners on the sites i visit. In fact, i'm kinda glat to see them as i know the site has some funding. All in all, i think Norton is being irresponsible to block banners and all they will end up doing is making advertisers rely more on nuiscance ads, like popunder and flash ads(shudder).
what happens if i'm using this software, and slashdot has a separate server dedicated to serving up all their images? then all the beautiful slashdot artwork goes away.
Then in essence this software is rewritting a copyrighted work without permission of the copyright holder, is it not?
We all hate advertisement, but as with public TV, it's the reason we can get it for free...
I'll assume theat you mean broadcast TV and not public TV. Broadcast TV is supported by ads; public TV (i.e. your local PBS station) is supported largely by pledges made by the public (hence the name), with underwriters of some shows.
One may argue that acknowledging the underwriters at the end of a program counts as "advertising" but at least the shows aren't interrupted halfway through and the acknowledgement is generally less than 10 seconds per underwriter (about a minute or so per hour by my guestimate) instead of the 15-20 minutes of advertising per hour of broadcast TV. (http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/ratingsAds.html)
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I'm a computer programmer. I can assure you, the average computer user is a total blockhead.
A few good assumptions to make when designing software:
1) Set the defaults to something useful. 90% of users will never change them, and 75% don't even know what a "preferences" dialog is.
2) Make clicking "Yes" the safe option. Users frequently don't read dialog boxes.
3) Don't give users any decision more complicated than a three-way choice, and if possible, make it a binary (on-off) choice. Anything more complicated just increases tech support calls.
Guess what? Most people won't even realize that the ad blocking is on, and even fewer will realize they can turn it off.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
If you come to my site, you should accept my business model. If you don't like my business model, then don't come to my site. Sneaking on to a site to enjoy the "free" content without paying seems rather unfair.
Site owners could make internet dark for Norton users. They could make it very hard for the blocked users to use a site by putting more of the content in off-site hosted images. This would make sites incompatible with Nortoned machines (a note or link would explain how to turn off the offending bit of Norton) Or, you could circumvent blocking by hosting all ad-images locally and avoiding telltale ad keywords.
I smell an ugly arms race.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Do you think banner ads are still an effective way to offset the cost of a website, or has their time passed? If so, what do we replace them with?
I would recommend replacing them with 1x1 transparent GIFs.
Seriously though, with squid, a redirector, and about 200 rules, I very rarely see banner ads and it keeps my bandwidth costs down.
Sorry, but if I have to choose between a month of "supportive" web surfing and an extra 200MB of download/surfing/whatever, then it's not too hard to see which one I'd pick.
Here is a list of the number of URL rewrites that have occurred since I installed this system:
Feb 15302
Mar 16581
Apr 19221
Jun 20333
Jul 19294
Aug 10320
Sep 15912
Oct 13705
Now, every single one of those rewrites has spared me at the very minimum an HTTP request and a few hundred bytes. This applies only to non-banner objects (such as counters, which I also block). Ads are usually at least 3k with some extending far beyond that.
I should probably remind those that need reminding, that I have a monthly download quota of 3000MB. The bandwidth savings are too significant for me to ignore.
Flame away...
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
Site owners have countermeasures:
1. convert more content into images and host them offsite -- the site becomes unusable if external images are hidden
2. host ad images and scripts locally so they don't look like ad content
3. use a registration and login processes that do not work when ad-blockers are enabled
4. obscure ad-keywords or convert them to local images
5. use scripts to compute external ad-related link addresses
6. charge for all content
7. go out of business
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
One trick to add:
Stream all images through a CGI/PHP/Response.BinaryWrite type method. Pass (in the PATH_INFO) a hashed key (for example) that represents that persons Session. You can then keep track of whether or not that session is downloading banners or not. If they use a program like Norton's, it will strip the IMG completely and therefore never hit your script. If the script is never hit, you can redirect the user to a page explaining that while they may not be interested in ads, you need them to support the site.
Sheeshe, maybe in these days of software patents I should patent this "technology".
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
So what kind of ads will they tolerate? I run one ad-sponsored site. It's used standard banner ads since it went online in 1998. I've never received any complaints. They aren't obtrusive and aren't excessive in size or quantity. A single 468x60 up top and a few 100x100 on the left sidebar.
I agree that annoying, flashy animations that distract are annoying. So are pop-ups and pop-unders. So are flash (although those just appear as a "plugin missing" icon for me!). But what exactly is wrong with non-obtrusive, non-distracting banner ads?
Greg,
There are a lot of us that don't feel we need or want web advertising. And if it comes down to "do we want such and such web site to die a quick death, or are we willing to accept advertising" we would choose the quick death.
Why?
Because there are those of us who believe that commercial interests and commercial gain have spoiled the free and open medium that is the Internet. We also believe that if the money were pulled, most of the content would still be there.
Let's use Slashdot for example. The people who are responsible for Slashdot get paid for that responsibility. This money comes in as a result of ads. That's why about what seems like 50% of the time I get a Microsoft ad at the top of my Slashdot page. It seems out of place and frankly the words "sell-out" come to mind every time I do, but nonetheless, that is what happens.
What if it went away? Would slashdot go away? Nope. Slashdot *must* exist, because it is a good idea and people want it. Yes, it is nice that the good folks who bring us this service get paid to do so (lucky them!) but if they didn't, Slashdot would exist anyway. They just wouldn't get paid.
But what about the bandwidth? Ultimately it would be paid either by the people that love slashdot so much they were willing to foot the bill, or it would be hosted by a public or commercial service who understood what a good thing it was and bought into the idea. But it would definately exist.
(The subtle point here is "it's about choice" but you may have to wade through this entire message before you get it...)
Has the average slashdot user benefitted from all of this annoying advertising?
I haven't. Frankly, I don't see much of a difference in Slashdot than I did five years or more ago. In fact, I've noticed that it has been down a lot more, the moderators don't do as good a job, and the advertising is annoying.
Too popular? Too bad. I liked it better when everyone and their dog wasn't on it.
But I digress. I'm only bothering to write about your flamebait because of your last line (which I couldn't resist). You said:
"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."
Thanks for that. You can step off your virtual soap box now, lamer. The Internet was just fine without all of your fucking ads, and it will be fine still if they were all gone. However, since you obviously don't get the point of the 'net, or are too young to understand it, I would like you to give me the choice.
I want you to tell me how you are going to let me know which sites I am a "parasite" to, and which ones I am not. Because I don't want to visit ANY of your stupid ad sites.
Let me know how you are going to do that. Until you come up with an answer, remember that you are *forcing* you commercial ads on *me* without giving me any way to avoid them. And that makes *you* the parasite.
Get it?
Probably not....
Collaborative, voluntary creation works for software, it works on wikis, and it worked thousands of years ago when bards roamed around telling stories. I don't care if we kill every commercial website, it'll just hasten the arrival of better systems.
In the meantime, maybe sites with "other business models" will do better if they don't face so much competition from sites with annoying business models.
The extension as of version .4 blocks the ads before they get downloaded off the internet which makes pages load faster. You also have complete control of which sites and which ads get blocked. More power to the consumer is a good thing.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
Well, if you were to be _really_ evil you would serve banners as 1x1 color pixel grid tables instead of images (with cells merged as needed as optimization) ;) I've seen a couple of tools for doing that and of course it's not hard at all to make your own. I wonder why it is not used more widely. That would piss off even more users! Think about profits!