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."
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?
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.
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.
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?