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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.
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).
Banner ads have already failed. The global click through ratio is under three tenths of a percent.
...at least in the short run... right? If the image still gets downloaded, the view still gets counted, and the site still gets their half a penny or whatever. Unless the ad relies on JavaScript or something to send back the "I was seen" message... I realize I'm not sure how they work. Open mouth, insert foot...
"as was probably the case considering that ad blocking is automatically enabled in NAV 2004."
um i have been running nav2004 for a few months and i still get banner ads and pop ups. Its not my problem to fund your site. so if anyone knows how i can activate this wonderful feature, (if for nothing else than to try it out) can they please post because i have never seen this behavior.
Is it possible this is a 3rd party app i didnt install?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Another signature based product...exactly what we need. so when is the next buffer overflow against norton coming out?
sorry officer, left my sig in my other computer.
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?
Exchanging advertisements between businesses for mutual benefit is not a good way to ensure continued success anyway.
What?
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.)
Mozilla-firebird already does this with a small extension. It works with regular expressions and you can enable disable it at will so you can still support the sites you want to support. Maybe it should be more like that, or maybe everyone should just use firebird ;)
Google got it right. Inobtrusive text ads instead of highly annoying flash/animated gif nightmares. I believe you can serve ads on your site through Google too.
Seems to make perfect sense to me. Trial periods which can be turned into subscriptions with a click. Seems the only way to support sites that can't garner enough donations.
Blar.
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!
New funding scheme: Web Enabled Blood Donation! Rather than be forced to endure pop-ups, banner ads and the like, users can opt to connect themselves to a blood donation system that draws a small amount of blood and sends it to the users local Red Cross as payment for viewing a site! It's also a great way to limit the time you spend online... Too much and the user passes out! Hey, it's better than staring at 'YOU MAY ALREADY BE A WINNER!' all day.
Software that blocks banner ads is the equivalent of a TV that plays it's own commercials during shows, instead of the commercials being broadcast to it. Aside from manipulating site content to include "hidden" ads, banner ads are the only way most sites make money. Widespread ad blocking will just pave the way for much more annoying ways of advertising. NO 3rd party software should ever have the right to maniuplate the content on an internet site, it completely destroys what the purpose of the internet is.
--
Are you a Chipotle Fan?
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
ever been to craigslist.com? why is this site so popular? because it's sparse, and doesn't look like a grahic arts student vomitted all over the webpage
sorry, but the internet does evolve
ad systems will still be around, they are never going away on the internet, but they will come to resemble google's ad model: sparse, text-only, straight to the point
not stupid "hit the monkey on the head and get a free prize" carnival atmosphere flashing gifs and javacript
it's nauseating and insults the user and they have every right to block it
the flashing gifs and stupid pop ups will come to represent the early days of the immature internet
yes, the gaudy, amateurish internet is dying
long live the sparse, useful internet
ad revenue is not going to disappear
just some graphics artist jobs
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
pretty sure this is a feature of norton internet security not antivirus
Charlie Dont Surf!
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.
It's not an article, it's a submission.
~Berj
no, im not a linux zealot... i once installed redhat 8 on my sister's computer, but thats it.
however, i just had to make the point that linux is free, and is not ad supported. you don't need ads to make money on a site.
not that "be a subscriber!" (ahem, slashdot crew) is that much better, but imo a website should be a passion thing, not a money maker.
i'm personally fine with ads though. there's nothng wrong with them unless they are popups. even clickthroughs are fine, as far as im concerned. hence, i use firebird to block all popups. everything else i allow through, and on occasion, click.
Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
I think that settles the issue fairly well. If the spam filter sucks, then the majority (who are smart enough to turn it off) will turn it off. If it manages to satisfy the majority (doubtful but possible) then people will keep it on.
There are ways to enable a "gatekeeper" type function where requesting an ad generates a cookie for the referring site so that the site can determine if the ad was actually retrieved or not. This would allow sites to block browsers that don't at least retrieve the ad, thus preventing the "paid" access, where the fee is seeing the ad. As to if any of the ad services support this, I don't know.
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?
There is no web blocking feature in the symantec product designed for companys. I guess this is one of the issues you run into when running consumer grade products in a enterprise.
Back in the day, when I shared a single "56k" dial-up connection with my college roomie I hated adds with a passion, and used ad-blocking software, which worked pretty well.
Now, however, with my fast DSL connection and Mozilla blocking popups and flash (an add-on from mozdev.org, but I can't find the project at the moment) ads don't really bother me. There are some sites whos ads are very annoying, but with few exceptions those sites suck anyways. So tell me, who here (dial-up users excluded) still gets really annoyed by ads?
Laugh at stupidity: mod idiots +1 Funny.
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.
Linux, of Course.
Norton Antivirus doesn't run on Linux!!
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
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.
First of all, when the internet started it was free. Advertising sleazed in years after the whole structure was in place. The internet didn't need it then, and it doesn't need it now. I know my inbox sure doesn't need any more "advertising".
Second, not everybody uses Norton Antivirus. Or even Windows for that matter. And not only Norton blocks popups. You can do that yourself with a simple hosts file.
So to sum up - no, Norton Antivirus will not destroy the internet.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
as long as they aren't, like, on the right side of the page where my slashboxes are. Then, they deserve to be blocked.
Seriously, they're fine with me, as long as they don't go nutso with the gifs and the flash. Bandwidth appears to be getting steadily cheaper, and the new google ad-targeting system appears to be working and generating revenue (at least based on the growing adoption of it.)
As noted above, there are tons of ways to block ads, if you're so inclined. This is neither new nor unique.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
You can do something like this with the Firebird browser. There's an option to disable loading images from a site other than the one you're viewing. It would be nice to specify images that link to other sites, however.
I can't think of 2 people that -- honestly -- would NOT block ads and banners if it was just a click away.
/. readers were up in arms. How is this different?
/., so your bandwidth bills don't kill you.
Adding the function to let certain ad banners through because you want to "support" that site is stupid. It should be nominated for the most unused feature of a software program right up there with the "please send more spam" button.
I use the "block images from this server" in Mozilla on a regular basis. I block all cookies unless it breaks functionality on a site I want to access.
When it was suggested that TV-skip feature in a Tivo was "theft",
When one TV exec went as far as to suggest an implicit contract with TV viewers compelling them to watch the ads, most people here laughed so hard their sides hurt. Rightfully so.
I'm sorry, but don't whine to me about supporting a poor business model. If you can't afford to run the site, don't -- or keep mention of it off of
Use a "free" site, and let THEM worry about the ad-blocking software.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Ok, where did I put my violin?
Oh, come, come, come. Without a monster or two, it's hardly a quest... merely a gaggle of friends wandering about. - Owl
but the author's point was that Symantec isn't allowing whitelisting of sites or an option to be asked to show ads on a particular site, thus supporting the site's maintainer.
If anyone buys adspace on my site, I might care. Until then, feel free to block them. I don't see any ads in Linux, OpenBSD, etc. VIM's "poor children in uganda" ad probably isn't paying any bills. We don't make this stuff for money, we make it to ease karma for all the free software we use. The web needs to figure out a similar model, if one exists.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It's going to wreck any site that uses deep-linking, if the linking is done via server-side code, as any images in the linked-to page will obviously not appear (they're on a remote site!)
However, I doubt anyone'll care too much if these people need to come up with some original stuff.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
Here's my policy regarding ads.
- In recognition of the fact that most sites need advertising to stay in business, I by default accept banner ads. However...
- Any site that serves me a pop-up ad, gets blocked.
- Any site that serves me a pop-under ad, gets blocked.
- Any site that serves me an annoying, flashing ad, gets blocked
- Any site that serves me deceptive ads (designed to look like a warning from the OS that I don't use, or says anything like "Congratulations you're a winner") get blocked.
- Any site that serves a Flash ad, gets blocked.. (or will, as soon as I figure out how to do that with Mozilla)
I guess I'm not visiting the right sites (or am I?),
but banner ads just don't bother me. Yes the occasional pop up at nytimes (which seems to get around firebirds popup blocker) is kind of annoying but regular banners? If they were all erased by this software the whitespace would just seem......weird.
You have to be really sensitive to be affended by them in my opinion.
The only thing that bothers me is the whole doubleclick tracking you around the net w/ cookies thing but thats a whole other conversation.
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?
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 internet was free before you got here. stop acting like it's the end of the world if companies without a business model fail to survive on ad revenues. hell, I'd prefer to go back to the days of the text internet if it would only get rid of all the crap.
Trust a slashdot editor to expound their own (silly) views.
If people are willing to PAY money for a product that runs on THEIR computer, then it is FINE if users GET an on/off switch. Some people actually like on/off switches rather than POSIX regex libraries.
If the on/off is too clunky, and indeed breaks every image and link to other sites as the submitter claims, then people will get sick of it and turn it off. If it works as well as some of the banner and pop-up things folks pay for they will leave it on.
If we follow this system we don't have to submit to the judgment of a slashdot editor, or any other single person.
On one hand /. is upset that the TV industry takes offense at people FF through commercials.
/. that people are blocking banner ads on the web.
On the other hand,
Now I'm confused. When is advertising good and when is advertising bad? I think I'll go home and FF through some commercials...
You say: ... the days of the "Free Internet" will be almost over ...
What you neglect to say is that before banner ads, Gator, pop-unders, etc. there was a very thriving free Internet (excluding ISP charges).
And, btw, it was just fine by me.
In the early 90s I very happily found about the same amount of useful information and free products on the Internet as I do now.
I don't need Amazon to exist to feel like I have a complete Internet experience.
Caution: Contents under pressure
What's next? People whining about Norton Antivirus 2004's spyware blocking features?
People are *sick of the CRAP* on the internet. They're sick of the fact that the WWW is becoming a junk ridden flea market.
They're sick of banner ads that go FLASH!FLASH!FLASH! at them and they're sick of misleading "System Error" messages that turn out to be banner ads.
Quite obviously *someone* wants the features that NAV2004 has. Symantec didn't just put stuff in the application because some programmers had a bunch of free time.
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
I use AdShield wich is better for me, you can customize wich images, links, forms, pages, pop-ups you want block, and it lets you import/export block lists. It was free but now with version 3.0 it costs $29.95, but it's a good app. If you want to try it, go to http://www.ad-shield.com/.
Tsk, tsk. Decisions, decisions. And as if that weren't enough, they want you to be consistent?
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.
I, for one, welcome the new "I work for ____ / that ____ has since been let go." troll!
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I've been using
until you realize that you can tear all the pictures and ads out of a magazine and just read the text. As long as you don't redistribute this modified version without permission of the copyright holder.
atleast thats one argument.
As far as im concerned there isnt any free internet, even after you pay for your equipment, then your access service, you still have to pay for content by watching advertisements..
Thats not free in my book...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've seen discussion about this elsewhere a while ago. It's not the first time this topic pops up.
Most webmasters sugested technical or legal solutions.
A popular suggestion was to trick the filter into blocking useful content to render the site unuseable. Those included, among javascript tricks (checking for the presence of a named image or something), having your navigation bar being an image map in banner size etc. I don't know if it's a good idea to exclude users/customers, but it's a way to draw the user's attention to the fact that there is a "problem" with their filter program. You can also probably include the word "advertisement" in some background colours into your links somehow...
Some other people considered to sue for copyright infridgement. IANAL, but the basic idea was to claim the modification of copyrighted work and redistribution (the filter is a proxy - so it takes a webpage and distributes a modified version). Don't know if that has any chance...
It seems that all those anoying, flashy banners finaly fire back...
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.
p2p
Replay TV got sued and scared into abandoning some neat features including commercial advance (on upcoming models). See previous /. article on this:m l?tid=99
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/05/23/1437247.sht
How long will it be before the lawyers think of a way to sue web ad blockers like Symantec (regardless of whether they have a legal leg to stand on).
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
Make your ads not suck, and I won't block them.
I've been blocking ads for years, by using Squid + URL rewriting. I've had a pretty simple rule for such things - unless your ad is VERY annoying, I don't add you to the blocklist.
What is "very annoying"?
Be simple, be brief, be somewhat on target to the page I am viewing, and I won't block you.
I am a person. I am not a "consumer" - a gullet with eyes to see ads, ears to hear ads, a mouth to consume product, and an anus that craps cash. Treat me like a "consumer" and you go bye-bye.
www.eFax.com are spammers
"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
NAV 2004 isn't a sea-change; it's just one more product in an ongoing technology race between legitimate advertisers (and spammers and everyone in between) and honest consumers (and parasites and everyone in between). If enough consumers read your ads despite the software, great. If not, you'll need to find a way to evade the software (i.e., require that your readers also read the ads) or find another way to make money. Another day, another challenge.
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.
I've been using norton firewall 03 and it has the same if not very similar ad blocking. I haven't seen a banner ad in months (along with popups thanks to firebird). There are options to disable it and to add certain ads that aren't caught to the list which it then sends back to Symantec to add to their list and block the ads in the future. -please ignore my prior post something got screwed up
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.
Personally the popups push it over the limit for me.
I know there is no such thing as a free lunch and that banners ads can't even pay the bandwidth bills. And so, I have always acceptet ads on webpates. Of course if the noise/signal level changed and the message drowns I often choose not to visit that site again.
Still, after surfing for an hour, there's about 20 popup windows that I need to close and many people are annoyed by this.
So talking about ways to avoid popups were not limited to porn surfing but everyday use of the internet and the issue and seeking help of how to avoid it could now be done without hinting your surfing habbits. This have turned more attention to ad blocking programs and utilites, and I think that once people get enough of pop-ups, they might choose a program that will block ads all together.
Personally I have found that Google tools is the best solution for me, works great and the price is right. I have not found any payware that has better functionality in the matter of blocking popups. Just make sure to read the notice from Google before choosing your installation.
For the unlucky people that still are on dialups, the webdesigns of today really tests your patience, and if I were on dial up, I would look for any options to speed up my line, and eliminating ads, by installing a blocker would be worth my while.
> 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?
I thought the line was obvious, if you are supplying text, then a text add, obviously indicated as such.
if your a picture content deliver, then picture adds, are what would be acccepted.
If your content is flash animation's, then sure, flash animation for ad's is right on.
But if you want me to install/launch a flash player to read text news, forget you, you crossed 3 lines of content.
This was automatically the rule in prvious media. I mean you don't have to worry about radio sending you video advertising. or TV supplying aroma or feal advertising.
but now with so many forms of content distributed over the net, somehow web admins get it in their mind, that someone who comes to their sight for one form of content, should be expected to have 10* the amount of bandwith dedicated to ad's as content.
would you continue watching TV, if 10 minutes of content were surounded with 100minutes of pure advertising, with no content in the ad's? I would guess radio and tv have a ratio of 22 minutes of content supported by 8 minutes of ad's. If your bandwith use is to a simular ratio, then I got no problem with that, no blocking from me.
I, however, do not use it frequently. I block all popups (built into Mozilla also), but I allow almost all banner ads. If a site is annoying, or I don't want to support them in any way (like they're democrats or something) then I'll block their ads.
Another Mozilla built in that I turn on is image looping, I set it to only once. So I frequently see crap that says If this is flashing, you win! that isn't flashing. I love that part.
Commercialization is upon the Internet, deal with it.
People also have the right to fast forward through commercials & block any ads.
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
Actually I do like the idea of ad blocking, but in actual use I find myself turning it "OFF" when I know i'm going to be visiting sites I normally do and "ON" when I am looking for something on sites i've never been too.
The Reason?
I visit a lot of game/mod sites and i've noticed that a lot fo them (including my own) will not show the affiliate links with the Norton Ad blocker turned on. this is bothersome because some mod sites (not all) which I like have long url's off of XYZ hosting company and since I am too lazy to type in the name I rely on going to say XYZvault.ign.com and clicking XYZ affiliate's button link.
Ave Molech Setting
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.
The last time I checked the US Constitution (sorry, I haven't looked what constitutions for other nations), there was no guaranteed right to the sale of ad space as a viable business strategy. If you want to wait a while, I'm sure the day is coming when Congress makes ad removal a copyright crime. Until then, I'd recommend moving to a subscription model.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
If the ads are worth seeing people will disable the feature, if they aren't find a better revenue model. And how do consumers see if the ads are worth seeing if they are blocked automatically? In the free market, consumers get to evaluate the merits of something and make a decision. Norton's product removes that opportunity. Even if the ads were wonderfully engaging, you would never see them.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Text ads have a much better bandwidth per click ratio, and are much harder to block than banner ads.
I remember the internet way back when, yep the medium worked but it wasn't nearly as interesting as it is today. The reason the internet has taken off is because of its commercial uses.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
You are missing the point. We are not talking about free access to the the Internet, we are talking about free content.
Broadcast TV content is free and funded by advertisement revenue. I still have to pay for the TV set and the electricity.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
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
With Mozilla I could happy block ads and browse ad-free, Norton now makes this mainstream and will cause websites to sit up and take notice.
Its not too hard to add a little bit of code that detects whether the advertising images are being loaded and refuse to show the content if so.
Stating an opinion on this is pretty pointless. The tech has been available for a while, with NAV2004 simply packaging it in a convenient and widely distributed form.
/. is flirting with this model.
Any business model based on forcing consumers to do anything on the Net is doomed (unless the Net and consumer hardware change a lot, which a number of companies are trying very hard to make happen). Tech will always appear which allows users to circumvent unwanted content.
Sites dependent on advertising can respond by politely asking their users to allow the ads to display (and to read them, and respond to them). Sites can be aware of what ads create special resentment and desire for circumvention (e.g., those horrid moving, floating flash ads) and voluntarily renounce them.
Or, sites can just give in and go for a pay model. A really good site with desirable content can make this work (e.g., Salon, which keeps defying its detractors' predictions by not dying). Of course, even
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
...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.
I have no idea why that link fails to work. I must be new. It is here:
h tm l?tid=99
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/05/23/1437247.s
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
So, how do you propose to pay for web hosting and bandwidth?
That's not my problem. If you want to run an ad-based site, then you're going to have to deal with the fact that said ads are now blockable. Just like the telemarketers are dealing with the DNC list. If you business model ceases to be profitable, that's not my problem.
If your content is so valuable, then maybe you should charge people for it. If you can't make enough to pay for hosting, then maybe your content isn't as valuable as you think it is.
True, charging people a couple cents for a page view is difficult at this point. But perhaps this will force those who need easy micropayments to make their business to figure out how to do it.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
That is SUCH a senseless comment, if you install software from "Symantec" that blocks all theses ads then you already made that choice as the consumer.
moo
It's not "responsibility to accept advertising" so much as the consumer has to recognize that banners provide websites with revenue, but that ignoring them is your right. It would also be the website owner's right to use paid subscriptions as an alternate revenue model. Cable TV is an example of what happens when you get the annoying ads AND have to pay for the content - people resent it. I think cable only became near-ubiquitous because there was no other way for people to get access to all those shows they want to watch. Hence the popularity of stealing cable (same ads, no cash cost), and now mini satellite dishes (same price, same ads but a zillion channels).
The pre-commercial internet was nice in many ways, but it sure had a lot less stuff on it.
And not all the extra stuff is bad stuff.
Freedom: "I won't!"
The consumer did not install ad blocking software. The consumer simply purchased a computer with anti-virus software, which comes enabled by default, and which happens to include - whether the consumer knows it or not, wants it or not - anti-ad software, which also comes enabled by default. At least, that's what the OP claims. So the consumer probably has, at *most*, made a choice to buy a computer with AV software. Many haven't even thought that far.
I'm sorry, but I've paid for my "free" internet from day one. And each day that passes, I find banners and pop-up ads more and more annoying, intrusive, and frustrating. If not for browsers like Mozilla with pop-up blocking, I'd probably have given up on web browsing by now. Is Norton doing the world a favor? Possibly, although there's the whole "they're controlling what I see" tip that lots of people will pull out of their bag of tricks. Honestly, if I can surf without seeing all that shit, more power to whoever enabled it. As long as I can turn it off if need be, then that's fine.
You shouldn't rely on banners anyway. Pasting banners and pop-ups everywhere on the web isn't going to be an effective way of advertising. I'm sorry, but when I see a banner, even if it's for something that looks "cool", I don't click the motherfucker based on principle.
My point is I'm paying for my bandwidth, and if I'm some chump on dial-up that has to wait for your shitty 250K flash ad to load, then it directly interferes with my browsing and you can ESAD. The internet never was free (you think people pay $45/mo. for cable for nothing? How about Uni's, some of the oldest groups on the net?), it's just that wannabe freeloaders like you don't like the concept of paying for your bandwidth. Period. Oh, and you have that whole "inferrior snakeoil product" thing going for you too. It's people like you that made the web the wasteland it is today. Excuse me if I don't shed a tear when your business folds because Norton blocks your ads. So take your casino gambling ads, your porn, your bonzai buddy trojans, and your weight loss + viagra pill combos and go back to pasting ads on phonepolls and bathroom stalls.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
My web site visits are, 98% of the time, done in order to hunt down technical support information (drivers, documentation, service bulletins, firmware, patches, etc.) for electronic test equipment or computing hardware. This is the exact same kind of service that dial-up BBS's, operated by equipment manufacturers, provided for years before the Internet came into the public eye.
The last thing I need, when I'm hunting for important stuff like that, is to be bombarded by irrelevant banner ads. As it is, there are far too many hardware manufacturer web sites that are so crammed full of graphics bloat, unnecessary FLASH animations, and JavaCrap, that they're nearly impossible to use.
You'll never convince me that banner ads are needed for something like a tech support site. It still costs far less to run such a site than it does to have experienced techies taking calls and stuffing floppies or CD-ROMs into envelopes.
Banner ad blocking is indeed a decision best left to the computing consumer. Personally, I would never depend on such ads as any source of critical income.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Pop up ads? Not heard of that - oh wait, that's an IE 'feature' isn't it?
Until recently, I've deliberately never blocked any ads on slashdot because they have never got in the way. But now that TPTB have decided to put ads where I normally see slashboxes, I'm afraid the ads had to go.
I glad to see more and more ads are now created with flash. Suits me fine - I don't do flash.
Nobody (end-user) wants adds, pop-ups, or pop-under's. Also nobody wants to pay for site access either. I personally can tolerate neatly placed banner ads but thats about it.
The past is just the present only older -me-
Adding a few lines of code in Mozilla / Phoenix can do this, check out http://texturizer.net/firebird/adblock.html and you'll not need a seperate product.
The Internet was popular even when people only had Lynx to browse the web.
Apparently we replace them with slashdot stories that are just mentions of commercial products that do nothing new, just the same things others have been doing for years, but pretend that it's new.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Or at least the version in Norton Personal Firewall 2003 can be, and presumably it can be in NAV2004. It does take a bit of effort to do so, and generally people don't enjoy looking at ads anyway. So why should they make the effort?
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself." -Richard Feynman
I might finally get rid of these irritating ads (and popups?) at my work place! :-)
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.
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 haven't seen ads for a LONG time (yeah mozilla and firebird!) and I don't really care if that puts a company out of business.
As societies and as /., we have historically had an 'adapt or die' mentality, and this is no different. NOBODY likes banner ads. When a business demands something that people don't like, people will either adapt, or a competitor will arise that doesn't make the demands. It looks like people have adapted by exterminating banner ads.
So adapt or die. Ask people for money, even if it's a token amount. Maybe serve up content for 1000 views and then stop giving content until they pay. If your content really is that useful, limit the content to people willing to pay for access. If your content isn't that useful, why do you care? If you charge too much, be prepared for somebody else to offer it up on their own money, in which case you'll avoid the burden of hosting the content. For some obvious examples of this, just look at the sites that mirror /. and omit the ads.
Its not a major issue, just economics in it's most basic form. People don't want product A bundled with product B, so they will seek out places that don't bundle it, or ways to remove it. If your business model depends on that bundle, it's time to get a new business model.
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Can anyone confirm whether it blocks ads from Symantec? I bet it doesn't.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
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
The systems are simply fleshing out ways to make money. I personally browse a select number of sites for idle curiousity more than anything. If people want to make money off me they better come up with some pretty dynamic and interesting content. I can 'do without' TV... it is nice tough... I can do without daily comics.. it is nice though.
The Internet is an ever-evolving beast which will respond to all forces.. free or otherwise. I pay to hook in and exchange my views and my thoughts.. which are worth money as well. I don't get paid for those.. I contribute content and don't get paid.. If a site is to become a business then it has to pay those who develop content.. including the users... or make those items free.. free as in speech.
All business is out to grab your money and your time.
You have a right to give as much or as little as you want.
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
Advertising is an insidious and insulting attempt at mind control, whatever its form or motivation.
I say ban *all* advertising (regardless of the consequences).
As for web ads, I think of it like this;
1. I pay by volume for traffic.
2. This cash goes to my ISP not the advertiser.
3. I pay for the ads that I download when I visit a website. This is wrong. Why should I pay to download an ad for a product that I have no interest in nor (usually) any way to purchase?
4. (and most importantly) My computers behavior is (or should be) under my control; I should have the right to control what my computer downloads from the internet. If I choose to filter content from websites, for whatever reason, that is MY business and noone elses.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
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.
Damn. I hope you put on your asbestos suit before you posted this question. You are going to get flamed BIG-TIME :)
The "Free Internet", as you refer to it, was here long before your banner ads and attempts at commercialization. And regardless of what the doomsaying, non money-making web weenies say, it will be here long after you are gone.
Take a hint from HBO... If you want to make money off your Internet investment, offer content that people are willing to pay for. Don't get mad when people find a way to bypass your bandwith-wasting banners ads. And don't bitch at Symantec. If people didn't ask for the feature, it wouldn't be incorporated into the product. But I DO agree with the position Symantec should probably make users aware of what their product is doing and give users a way to turn it on and off for specific sites.
If its sitting between render and download, it might be downloading the images anyway, and just never displaying them. That way, instead of destroying your impressions market, it will just destroy advertiser trust and confidence in banner marketing campaigns.
Wheeee...
YLFIOne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Norton Internet Security 2004 does and its been blocking ads since Norton Internet Security 2000. The only difference in this version is that it's more integrated with IE (presumably a rightclick/block menu option).
Ad blocking has no place in antivirus software, it just doesn't make sense.
In theory, with no banners or ads you would need less bandwith. You can move around a lot of text and small pictures with a 10 GB monthly transfer or a 128kb uplink.
I'm looking forward to less bloated pages on the net.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
It's a child play to work around such things... and force everyone to read the pub...
So never fear the revenue, just count the $$$
Originally I had no problem with small banner ads placed above, below or besides web content.
But at some point in time, site builders and banner advertisers decided that a banner ad would only be seen when it was animated.
It started out with animated GIF's, and when the browsers allowed to defeat that they went on to flash movies. Not to mention pop-ups.
I am trying to use some informative site, like a phone directory, a news service, or what have you, and while reading 25 lines of text there are 10 banners around and between it, all spinning, scrolling and flashing.
THAT caused the advertisements to pass the irritation threshold, and people finding a way to defeat them. I am using squid with some filters, and settings in Mozilla. Others use programs like mentioned in the article, or in some of the replies.
When people are looking for a way to get rid of the advertisements, it is not because they do not want to see advertisements at all. It is because advertisers blew it, by exceeding the irritation threshold. Dumb dumb dumb.
The online gaming comic penny-arcade actually mentions it's choice of ads in the rant that comes along with the comic on various occasions and explains why the ad might be interesting to gamers. I've actually clicked through on ads from penny-arcade more than many other sites added together because of this.
I know animeondvd does something similar and will sometimes mention deals being given by affiliates in it's news posts - I've gone to check those out several times as well. arstechnica keeps a sticky in it's general hardware forum on the latest deals from newegg, which has gotten me a few times as well.
So maybe if you are careful about whose ads you are showing and mention why that company is interesting somewhere in your content, maybe a news post or whatever, you might not have to worry so much about ad blocking.
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!
Of course we don't have the responsibility to accept advertising. Install whatever you want, but you don't strike me as the kind of person that likes censorship, and that is a very real danger when an antivirus software starts stripping code out of HTML heuristically. Certainly you don't want to miss out on some important content just because it happened to have some similar properties to an advertisement...
What is so bad about banner advertisements anyway? They're so common I see right through them... all I need is a pop-up blocker and ads don't bother me a bit. Your idealistic rant against commercialism on the Internet is quaint but sadly out of touch with reality. Are you really claiming that the pursuit of profit has never led to any good Internet content? Face it, advertising and successful communications media are symbiotic because advertisers put money into quality content production. To claim that all (or even most) good content comes from altruistic and disinterested private parties is utterly nonsensical.
As long as they don't get in the way. I use Mozilla and appreciate the ad-blocking capabilities, but I really don't use it unless the ads are interfering with my surfing.
Just like when looking through a gaming magazine I don't mind the ads for the upcoming games.
If it's similar to the content on the site, I don't mind the ads as long as they don't distract me from what I'm using the site for. Sometimes I'll even be interested in something and click on them.
However, if they're overly flashy and make it hard for me to concentrate on the information on the site, I just right-click on it and block them.
So in general, I really don't mind seeing ads as long as they flow well with the page. In some cases I appreciate them because I can learn about something I may not have heard of before. If they get in the way, then they're getting blocked. I don't think it's a good idea to simply block all advertisements.
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.
Shows how pathetic some of the moderation is since the insipid parent of this is +5 insightful, and this one isn't rated higher.
I'm the lead web developer for a large website (over 1,000 jsps, over 4 million registered members). We serve our images, .css and .js files from external servers at a separate domain, which removes load from our small server farm, and greatly speeds up response times for our users. If Norton or other popular consumer tools start blocking images not stored on the same server as the original request, they will not see any images, stylesheets, or javascript. Blocking popups on other servers is one thing, but preventing the use of an image server is just plain stupid. Gotta leave control in the hands of the user. This is the domain of the browser and its configuration. (as an aside, if one browser *koff* mozilla firebird *koff* happens to be better at this than others, perhaps users will have YARTDIE (yet another reason to drop IE)....
now I'm rambling.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
That's some funny shit! Thanks for the laugh, I needed it.
"Life is not magic." Dr. Ron Weiss - "If we don't play God, who will?" Dr. James Watson
On a related note: I've been using Proxomitron for some time now. It's a proxy server that strips or adds (or does whatever you please, really) HTML to pages you're viewing. Unfortunately, the developer has abandoned it, but the latest version still works, and it's free!
Anyone interested can find it here.
It is part of Norton Personal Firewall 2004.
NEW! A Web assistant lets you block ads and access other program options from Microsoft(R) Internet Explorer.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
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
Maybe you like the force fed swill the internet and media bullies feed you every waking moment of your day, but think about us, the actual consumers.
We buy products like NAV 2004 and Tivo's because we don't want to see the advertising. We buy the products we want, not the ones we're force fed. I'm not about to say I've never bought something I've seen advertised, but what I am saying is that sometimes I like to sit down, watch an episode of The Simpsons without hearing about the latest drug that will give me more that I have to cure, or the best female leakage eliminator. Face it, we don't want your advertising rubbish, and the reason Symantec probably added ad blocking, was because they want to sell their software to people like me.
I suppose your next complaint will be the very effective (read 98%+ in my tests) junk email blocking that Outlook 2003 includes. Come on, we all know the only reason spammers spam is so they can sell you're their latest and greatest anti-spam software.
I mean, the truth is, all of us have money to spend, and all of us like getting new things to play with... Whether they be upgrades for our computers, upgrade for our cars, new clothes, books, whatever... We live in a consumer culture -- everyone has something they'd like to buy.
And once we're on the net, we've got the infrastructure and the processing power to really tailor advertising in a very personalized way. But no one seems to be doing that! No one's seems to be really taking advantage of the communicative abilities being offered by this new medium.
With all the cookies being left in my browsers for years now... You'd think by now every single banner ad I see would be for something I'm actually interested in. That any software ads I'd see would be for Linux or Mac software, and not Windows. That instead of banner ads for Jack Black's latest movie, I'd be seeing ads encouraging me to go see Lost in Translation a third time.
And what about services that try to actually organize data about available products? Generally, whenever I go to buy something, I start out by making a list of features I'd like it to have, then try to find something that has all those features and is as affordable as possible. A few months ago my computer's keyboard died and I faced the horrible problem of trying to find a search engine that would understand I want an "ergonomic (i.e. split) USB keyboard, with additional USB ports on the back, with plenty of multimedia keys and made by someone other than Microsoft." Eventually got tired of looking and settled for one that wasn't ergonomic.
And I'm now having a similar experience trying to find a digital camera with the features I want.
eBay seems to be the easiest to use when it comes to this sort of "searching for specific features" idea. And indeed the largest portion of my online purchasing money in the last year or so has been spent through eBay.
I think the main effect of the Internet is that it creates better informed consumers... I think consumers in general nowadays have a better idea of what they want when they go to make a purchase, and don't feel comfortable spending their money on whatever the flashiest banner happens to be next to.
I think these companies currently trying to make their money by serving up banner ads would be better off creating search engines that actually let consumers search for products based on any conceivable criterion.
I should be able to search for a new stereo deck for my car that plays MP3/CD's and CDRW's, has a 1/8" stereo phone line-in jack on the front, can read ID3 tags and has a display that can comfortably display up to 32 characters. I should be able to search for a digital camera that has at least 1.2MP, uses SmartMedia, has a built-in LCD and flash, uses USB and works with MacOS X. Etc etc etc...
Advertising shouldn't be about getting people to buy stuff they don't need. It should be about matching people up with the stuff they already want to buy. Some of these companies should also, perhaps, set up forums where people could describe things they'd like to own that don't even exist yet, in case someone's interested in trying to make them.
I don't see why anyone should have a problem with my blocking out (with the FireBird adblock extension) banners that I'm never in a million years going to click on. The truth is, even before I started using the adblock extension, on those occasions when a banner looked like it's related to something I'm interested in and I clicked on it, it's always turned out to be a complete red herring. So I very quickly stopped following them and figured if there's something I want to buy, I can seek it out myself.
If advertisers want to make money off of me, they should try to actually help me out in the task of finding things I want.
Please God, let me find my blue hat with the red trim. (Frances Farmer)
Banner and popup ads have been overdone. They're very annoying and easy to block.
Why not switch to other forms of ads. Html and dhtml ads are becoming increasingly popular, look good, and usually require much less bandwidth than alternatives. You can even animate them. Imagine a little puppy running around the page, occasionally playing or going after your cursor. You click it and it takes you to an online pet store.
I am under no obligation whatsoever to view your advertising. I am not interested in a sob story about the importance of your advertising. The mere idea that I have some sort of duty in this regard is ludicrous. If you are forced out of business because I refuse to view your advertising, then go out of business.
The Internet is supposed to be free-as-in-liberty, not free-as-in-beer. No one ever promised that you'd be able to make money here.
Personally, I believe that a feasible micro-payment solution will eventually arise. If, in the meantime, the Internet becomes completely commercial-free, then I for one will shed no tears.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
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
I've been noticing these a bit more often and I've started making rules in the Proxomitron to skip them when I can figure them out. I consider it a hobby. I've defeated Salon's and Yahoo Groups pretty easily.
Although it's quite possible for them to make something I cannot defeat, they do so at the cost of losing their user base, really.
- 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.
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.
My guess is that if this really does become a problem (and I'm guessing it won't...we've been able to do this for a while with Norton) rather than everyone panicking and trying to find a new medium by which to advertise, a simple javascript would fix the problem. It could even be a good thing. If you have a problem with people stealing your bandwidth by linking to images on your server, you might consider pushing this. Running a banner ad with a banner YOU host and using a simple javascripted redirect really won't be any different than the way things are run now, and should fix the problem. If Norton filters words, rename the file, simple as that.
I see this as a positive thing, mostly.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
Someone at Symantec was sitting around saying, "How can we get a lot of bad publicity on Slashdot? Oh, I know, we will install non-opt-in ad blocking. We won't even give users a choice."
Really? Wow. I've got Internet Security 2004, but I always assumed the ad-blocking bit was in the firewall component, not the anti-virus. Certainly, it's in the "Norton Internet Security" section of the menu, and not "Norton Antivirus"...
:)
However, the main point is: so what? It's trivially easy to switch ad-blocking on and off, and yes, that includes down to the site level. (Ad Blocking --> Configure --> Advanced (Configure Ad Blocking for individual Web sites). Works a treat. There's also the more general "Turn on Ad Blocking" option. None of this is rocket science, even my sister uses it - and she's normally so computer illiterate it's painful
I've been using it so long, I honestly can't remember whether or not it was switched on by default, but if you RTFM it's all nicely documented. It's not a secret feature designed by evil Symantec types to screw webmasters out of web revenue and consumers out of the joy of seeing yet another ad for Super-Mega-Effective Hair Restorer, or whatever.
I honestly think this has got to be one of the most pointless stories I've seen on Slashdot for some time. And let's face it, normally that's saying something.
In the meantime I place google adwords on the tops of my pages. Not because I want to be a millionare, but because my approach of "hey, my logs show you people obviously like this content, how about making a donation?" Has netted me $0.00 in my efforts to fund my site and keep it online.
So, to sum up: Donations == site dies, AdWords == site lives.
I use adwords because they are relevant, are not animated, don't take over the screen, and generally don't piss visitors off (and mainly because such banners piss ME off, while adwords don't).
Banners have gone the same way as spam to such a extent that there's been a backlash against anything that looks like advertising.
.gif animations and plugins all disabled. Banner ads that work in the first .gif frame are seen (in fact, at the top of this comment post page is a perfectly good Windows Server 2003 advert) while all the fancy crap goes missing. I still won't click on an ad anymore than I'll call the toll-free number on a television ad, but at least it counts as a page view for /.
I actually don't mind banner ads, in general. What I do mind is banner ads that interfere with the content. That basically means anything animated, anything that requires plug-ins, anything that pops up windows, etc. I've come to read articles, not have some asshole in marketing induce a seizure.
Unfortunately, just like there's essentially no spam that's truthful, bandwidth friendly, opt-in, and otherwise acceptable, there's virtually no banner ad that isn't overly intrusive.
So I've reached a decent middle ground (for me... advertisers might not like it). I use Konqueror with Javascript,
It sounds like NAV04 has gone a little overboard, but it was bound to happen. I'll make a point of ROTFL if I ever see a NAV04 banner.
c.
Log in or piss off.
No offense to anyone here who runs a site supported by banner ads... but much like spam: I don't buy things from banner ads, I don't buy things from pop-up ads, and I don't buy things from spam.
So I block all banner ads, pop-ups, and spam that I possibly can. I help to teach others how to do so too. I refuse to be held hostage by the idea that I must somehow "support" websites anymore than I am forced to watch TV commercials (I always switch) or listen to radio commercials (I switch, turn it off, or listen to CDs.)
I say YAY for any product that allows people to block banners. When people are still on dial-up (poor slobs) why should they be forced to download bs ads that they may or may not support.
Block the ads, I say. Let them hang. Let them find a new business model---I refuse to feel responsible for their businesses because I chose not to blindly have ads force-fed down my throat.
I fear I may be already repeating someone else, hm? I also refuse to feel sorry for RIAA or the poor starving musicians who can only buy 4 H2's this year instead of 5. ;)
Ohhh, but then the free sites I enjoy won't be free anymore... Aww. I can't take responsibility for that, sorry, any more than I can for telemarketers being out of a job or a spammer living in a trailer.. I mean.. nice house paid for with ill gotten gains.
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.
This in not new.
/. to be supported).
I have Privoxy set up on my Mac. I've configured it to block some well-known ad sites, although ads.osdn.com, along with some other ones that support sites I like, is specifically whitelisted (want
More importantly, I have it set to de-animate GIF images. While I don't mind banner ads much, I really hate the ones that flash in lots of colors. Especially the ones about "If this banner is flashing, you've won!" and the jittery fake Windows message boxes. The sites still get paid for the deanimated ads so long as they're not blocked, since they still get sent to my computer anyway.
I don't care so much about cookie-crunching and the like, but Privoxy also supports them, and it supports custom regexp filters. It's a very nice, fast, free personal proxy and works with any browser that supports proxies.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
The old cat & mouse game. You need the cat (ads) to take care of the mouse (content), and without the mouse there is no reason to have a cat. You have to have a good balance. Too many cats and too few mice, and you'll piss-off visitors. Too many mice and too few cats, and you'll lose your house. Balance is the ticket.
After the balance comes the problem of the type of cat. A simple mono-color tabby will do a good job, but your visitors won't be impressed. Get a big ferocious maine coon and visitors will not be able to see the mouse. Get a zippy, flashy, happy, playful calico and everyone will be too distracted to see the mouse. Of course, not all visitors are alike.
Consider your visitors. Some visitors can't stand cats and will be put off by you having any. Other visitors may think your cat & mouse fight is interesting enough to warrant having one or two around. Still other visitors are after the gore sport and don't care how many cats are involved as long as the mice get minced.
What would I do if I were running a website that required revenue to survive? Simple - I would ask my visitors. Maybe your visitors wouldn't mind a couple non-distractive ads, maybe a subscription plan without ads would work, or maybe you don't have many repeat visitors so it doesn't matter what they think.
The other item - adblockers. Whatever ads you have to run, test your site with various adblocking software. Find ways around the software. It may be as simple as keeping images on your own site but linking to other sites. Maybe putting ad text in the alt area would work so if the image is blocked your ad still goes out. But whatever you do, don't create distracting 'monkey punch','color flash' or Flash ads - those ads should be illegal.
There was lots of good content before banner ads, and there will be after. Even slashdot existsed for years without banners. There was (and would be again) more variety of content if we lost 'the free internet' and had to return to what it was before advertising dollars. That said, I think banners are a good revenue stream, a good marketing technique, and actively support content and applications supported by advertizing. But I also support the users' right to avoid advertising if they choose to. If ABC doesn't want to broadcast football because I'll miss the commercials with Tivo, that's their loss. If slashdot doesn't want to link to other sources of content unless I subject myself to eye-straining tags, likewise.
However, Television's been around a lot longer than the Internet and the adverts on TV have been evolving in the opposite direction. It's like a two-year-old screaming for Mommy's attention. "Buy me buy me buy me" over and over again until the only option is to bitch-slap the responsible party. I can't even stomach live TV anymore, or the local FM radio for that matter.
Maybe if advertising in general weren't so obnoxious, the advertising industry wouldn't be in such a slump. I think people are losing patience with it. Come on Ad industry! Just get to the damn point, make your pitch and get out of my face. You have 15 seconds (or 3 lines of plain text) Ready? ... Go! Oops. Too slow!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
troll v.,n.
1. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting ... designed to attract predictable
responses or flames; or, the post itself. ... The well-constructed troll is a post
that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look
even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to
the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate
troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. See
also YHBT.
2. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that the have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll."
Source: Jargon File 4.2.0
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
True, advertising is simply a means to try to profit from a medium. The medium itself has a cost to someone, somewhere and someone must pay that cost, whether it be money, time or some other type of expense.
It is interesting that people will spend several hundred dollars on a computer, as much as fifty dollars a month for an internet account, but not pay a single dime for actual content!
I suppose I would pay a little bit for the ability to occasonally peruse _good_ computer hardware articles. Computer magazines seem to be too simplistic and internet sites tend to do dozens of tests focusing almost solely on games, and with an average of two paragraphs and two charts a page at that.
A couple of days ago, when it came out that Symantec was blocking the NRA and other pro-gun websites, everyone ranted about how the user had the choice of whether or not to use the firewall?
Why don't I hear more of that now?
We can use not to install NAV 2004. We can use McAffee, or Dr. Solomon, or whomever else is on the market if we disagree with their ad blocking policy.
I personally would love it. I have never bought anything from a banner ad. I don't much plan to either.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Oh please, stop trying to act like an old sage. I remember the internet before it was commercial too, and the internet wasn't free then either. It's just that, back then, it was paid for by your university tuition, taxpayer dollars (for the .gov, .mil, and part of the .edu domains) and maybe a little by the handful of companies (.com) that were on it at the time. Also, the bandwidth back then was miniscule compared to now, since so few people were on the net then. And of course, there wasn't much to do back then on the net either: remote account access on Unix machines, USENET news, email, and some University-provided content via Gopher were about it. When the web came about, most web sites were on University servers, so again students' tuition bills (plus state tax funding) were paying the bill. There was no Slashdot, or the various other sites out there that people use a lot now: Google, Yahoo, weather.com, cnn.com, etc.
The only reason all these sites are free is because of advertising. Are you a paying Slashdot subscriber? Didn't think so. So if you're blocking the ads here while you're reading and posting, that makes you a parasite.
I'm certainly not terrible pro-advertising; I have no problems using the restroom during a commercial break on TV despite some exec's statement that this is "breaking a contract". But I accept advertising's presence as a necessary evil as long as I enjoy free services. A few people figuring out a way around ads isn't going to hurt anything, but if it becomes the norm, companies simply won't pay to advertise in these ways anymore, so don't be surprised when all the free sites disappear.
There has been software like this for a long time. Heck, i've been installing the Proximitron on all my wintel friends PCs for years.
For my internal lan (me an the roommate, and any people using my wifi) ive always had a privoxy server (formerly internet junk buster) available for use. IN fact, i recently rollled out a freebsd machine (first unix install at my workplace, w00t) that has the nice combo of spamassassin and privoxy running.
My mom runs proximitron, so does my sister and her roommate in school. Just be NAV is preinstalled, an a lot of people will use it by default, doesnt mean its going to change the way the web works.
Look out honey cause I'm usin' technology
Ain't got time to make no apologies
Nobody clicks on the banners because of all the funky javascript and other BS that certain people use to lock visitors into the advertiser's website and prevent an expedient return to the original website. When people are new to the web, all it takes is a few clicks on a few banners before they realize it is better to ignore (and possibly block them). Excessive marketing nonsense has essentially killed the banner ad, just as telemarketing and spam threaten the technology upon which they operate.
There are plenty of ways to block ads; I would rather see the antivirus companies to concentrate on blocking spyware/adware/malware. There is simply no excuse for letting this garbage through unless the customer explicitly allows it.
Now, of course, such a license could not be enforced, and this is why nobody actually puts out a license like this. But why is it a bad thing in principle? Somebody has to pay for the web hosting, and if it's not the companies putting ads onto my web page, there's only one choice left: You, the consumer, have to pay. So instead of shouting "Ads are Evil!", think about the minor annoyance they cause as a form of payment for the services of the web sites you are browsing.
Personally, I think a business model such as Opera's makes a lot of sense. If you pay for the product, it's ad-free; if you don't choose to pay with money, you have to live with the ads.
Blocking banner ads? That's nothing. Norton blocks STARTTLS encryption of SMTP (email) sessions, making it so that users CANNOT both scan outgoing mail for viruses AND encrypt their connection to the mail server. Everyone can read the mail - but at least there are no viruses in it!
Most annoyingly, they intercept the STARTTLS command with an innocuous error code, so that debugging it can be heinously difficult. Afraid to put "550 NAV is responsible for disabling your security" for some reason!
Now I'm not real old but I do remember using the internet in the late eighties. It was free AND I didn't have to see stupid banner ads on anything.
My mail got to where I sent it free. I got all the news I could handle for free. I could download all files I wanted for free (yes you could even get pr0n for free.) You could even play multiplayer, online games for free.
So what makes you think that the absence of banner ads will kill the "Free Internet"? It was around before banner ads were and it was free and alive then. It will be in the future as well.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Put that simply, it's true. But it's missing one huge, vast, crucial point: the advertisements are only valuable because of the visitors.
Why does Slashdot advertise? To pay the bills. Why do the advertisers give Slashdot money? Because Slashdot is valuable. Why is it valuable? Because people read it.
It's us, the readers, the give a website (or TV programme, etc) value. Never forget that. We don't need the advertisers. The advertisers need us. We are in control. We could kill Slashdot in a week, if we wanted to, merely by not visiting any more.
I don't see adverts any more. I have tinyproxy well trained to block them practically everywhere. You would not believe how much calmer and less stressful the web is now. I don't feel guilty about it --- I'm still visiting the websites, I'm still giving them value. I'm still posting comments like this, which people will read and comment on and in turn, give the website more value. Why should I be forced to have something flickering in the corner of my eye all the time, metaphorically screaming LOOK AT ME! READ ME! BE DISTRACTED! LOSE YOUR TRAIN OF THOUGHT! To me, adverts reduce the value of a website --- before I had tinyproxy, there were sites I just couldn't use any more. Too hard to find the content.
Yes, a website needs to earn its living, but for gods' sake, there are better ways of doing it than to deface the website beyond the bounds of usability. Look at Google --- advertising that's unobtrusive, tasteful, and actually works. There are other forms of revenue. There's sponsorship, which is not the same as advertising.
Yes, I'm one of those people who records commercial TV on videotape and fast forwards through the commercials. When I get a PVR, I'm going to make damn sure it has a skip-30 button...
O what decisiveness! What elegant parsimony! By God, this man has a profound point! Forbid a vast, general category, and damn the consequences!
You are either with us, or against us!
Pre-emptively destroy all advertising!
The enemy on the 'Net believes web surfers will run. That's why we're willing to filter out banner ads, pop-ups, click-throughs, login pop-ups, help pop-ups, and arbitrary secondary content of any kind. Blindly. Pre-emptively. Web surfers will never run!This functionality is NOT a part of Norton Antivirus, it's part of the Norton Internet Security firewall app.
This functionality is NOT new, and has been present in every version of the product that I've seen since 2000.
This feature is NOT turned on by default.
Any particular banner or host can be whitelisted by the user so that it will never be blocked.
Keep up the great editorial standards, Slashdot!
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Most likely, all will happen is that ads will be dynamically chached locally upon demand and then served through PHP or similar means. That way the ads will have the same domain as the main page. Also, don't name your banners things like "banner" or "ad" so you can fool the keyword search. Shouldn't be hard.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Can't go wrong with it.
The general encroachment of advertising into EVERY facet of American existence is creating an overall culture of backlash against the very concept of an advertisement. Advertising is showing up everywhere: they have ads on the back of bathroom stall doors, and above men's urinals for Pete's sake! Is no place sacred anymore? Anywhere there is dead space is game for advertising. If you watched the MLB playoffs or the World Series, you would have seen that advertisers secured time on a green screen right behind home plate, so that their ad would be visible everytime someone comes up to bat. Ads are showing up on grass or astroturf fields during broadcasts of football (both soccer and American Football) thanks to computer enhancement. Ads are showing up everywhere, and Americans in particular are getting sick of it. I remember seeing an immigrant on television saying "America has so many advertisements, and they are everywhere!" I had become so insensitive to them, that I hadn't even noticed how many we are subjected to everyday.
Replay/TiVo capitalizes on this abhorrence, as well as ad-blocking software. Web businesses would do well to find creative ways of raising awareness about their products without shoving flashy graphics, pop-up windows, and banner ads down people's throats. Targeted advertising is much better than broadcasted advertising; it focuses on those people who would most likely buy, and doesn't waste time, energy, or money on giving all people (including those who would never buy) the idea to buy their product. Advertising the old-fashioned way is still the most effective way of raising product awareness -- web businesses would be remiss in their duties if they didn't investigate the tried and true avenues of motivation, rather than hope for the best with enticement.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." Adolf Hitler
Ad blocking software provided by Norton (Symantec) is capitalism at its finest. On one hand Norton needs a way to encourage users to download their software. Providing an anti-banner tool is one way for Norton to add value to its product. On the other hand Norton can leverage their power against Ad networks. Ad networks can pay Norton a ransom to remove their tracking servers from Norton's anti-banner tool. It's a win win situation for Norton.
/. banner.
These anti-banner tools have been available for years however no one noticed because only smaller networks were affected. Tracking servers at x10, Performics, Mediaplex, Befree, and commission junction have been targeted for some time.
What makes Norton's anti-banner tool interesting today is Google involvement. Google is an Ad network (however most people fail to see this). Norton may have awoken a sleeping giant by targeting Google's servers. My guess is Google will pay Norton a fee. Google has too much at stake with Adsense to stand by while their ads are blocked. If Google does pay Norton then this justifies advertisings signicance. To those who think advertising does not add fuel to the internet, take a better look. In fact - just look at the top of your screen at the
Here are more interesting threads on the subject:
webmasterworld
abestweb
(anyone else think it's ironic that the Google toolbar blocks popups?)
I do tech support for an ISP and i don't know how many times i've seen norton firewall puke and start blocking all net traffic. what i want to know is this: is this neat new feature that will make every one want to upgrade to the newest version of Norton Antivirus going to break and start blocking everything? Sounds like bloat ware to me
If you're running Windows, and you have broadband, you need a firewall.
Windows XP -> Network Properties -> [Select Network Devices Properties] -> Advanced -> Internet Connection Firewall. You can choose "Settings" if you wish to specifically allow any incoming ports.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
A guy was in business selling a fairly unique product known as a spowker. There were two other fairly large companies well established in the market selling these devices at 50 a pop. This independent guy decided to sell his spowkers at 10. Even though he was gaining customers, his profits were non-existant, and, as such, he was struggling to keep the business running. On a chance call from one of his customers, he was asked how he could sell them so cheaply upon which he replied that his profits were suffering. The customer asked why he did not raise his prices, to which he said that he did not want to annoy his loyal customer base. His customer made a note-worthy plea. "By increasing your product price to 20, you will improve your profit margin and keep trading. If you were to continue at current prices, you might cease trading, at which point I will have to start paying 50 for the same product" The man increased his price, made loads of money, and everyone was happy... Right, the point I am trying to make here is that a failed business model as a direct result of ad-blocking might not be 'tough' just for the business, but also for the end user who might rely on information on such sites being available 'free'. I've bought many things online which I see advertised. OK, so not everything is to my taste, and yes, I do hate overkill, but targeted marketing is always positive. I'll crawl back under my rock - it's late and i don't make sense...
Oh, look mummy a muppet! Can I take him home and keep him (in the basement, where I can torture him)?
Harsh, but fair! - As we will see...
So, how do you propose to pay for web hosting and bandwidth?
I use money, what do you use? Big gold bars by the sounds of it (going by how much you seem to willing to pay for simple, cheap, easy to provide services)...
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.
No only do I, for example, get my 2 MB ADSL for 70 UKP Month, I get 250MB Webspace with it too, with full CGI (Perl, PHP) & SSH (+ other value ads) and it's very reliable. Hell, they arn't even the cheapest either, I'm just too slack to move!
I get 250 MB of webspace, with no pre-determined limit (it's based on a case by case basis, if you don't take the piss, they don't take any notice, which is how most places work, because they can't be bothered with hard or soft limits, it just doesn't pay financially to do it, most service providers just check for gross offenders).
So I get my solid ADSL for a reasonable price (quite cheap by UK standards for 2 MB [unquota'd]) and I get effectively free web hosting thrown in.
Good greif, you can get a DEDICATED SERVER with over 42 GB of transfer per month (which you can spread over a year to average it out) FOR LESS THAT 30 UKP A MONTH! [and extra transfer is 1 UKP per GB].
I spend more than that going to the pub in weekday evening! It's hardly breaking the bank is it?
If, by some good fortune, your website does more than say 50 GB of traffic a month and your not able to think of other ways than just advertising to make revenue, then it would best for all concerned if you just kept off the internet and left us alone to have grown up conversations.
People would use the internet if there was no on-line advertisement sponsored content on it at all. To attempt to argue that it's some kind of economic requirement for the world web web to function is to be argumentative and feeble minded.
"Does NAV2004 have some kind of feature where certain sites can be exempt from ad blocking (in the case you do wish to support a site with ads)?"
Please, Correct me if im wrong - but doesnt "Supporting a site with ADs" mean that one must actually click on the ads?
I dont see the difference between blocking the ads and jsut not clicking on them - aside from the obvious cleaner thought-space and the atrophy and sweet death of marketing creatures the world over.
There's 3 ways the web publishing industry can respond:
Face it, advertising is just a sneaky, indirect way to get money to the publisher by first tricking the reader into doing business with a corporation she wouldn't otherwise buy from, and then the corp giving a fraction of that to the web publisher. As we all know from Newtonian physics, every additional link in a chain of interactions adds inefficiency which drains power from the final output. Wouldn't it be better to cut out the middleman, and let readers directly pay for the content, instead of all that rigamarole?
Of course it would, so long as the overhead cost of making the payment is less than the costs the advertiser incures on the publisher. For that to happen, we need a high-tech, efficient way to pay for webpages. We need micropayments.
So far, "micropayments" have failed (and few attempted projects have even really tried micro payments). But that's because they've never had any content viewers really wanted to buy. With the specter of vanished ad revenue hanging over them, there'd be a true incentive for big-name sites to move into pay-only mode. And they'd have desparate incentive to make the software convenient enough for global use.
I won't go further into micropayments, because they've been covered extensively. I just wanted to present the hope that necessity will someday mother the invention.
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?
Good greif, you can get a DEDICATED SERVER with over 42 GB of transfer per month (which you can spread over a year to average it out) FOR LESS THAT 30 UKP A MONTH! [and extra transfer is 1 UKP per GB].
Thank you for proving my point. Translating into US$, that's 42GB/month for about $45 a month -- $1 per GB.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
It's just that they only work when they work well.
Google is rolling naked in vats of crispy, crunchy cash right now because they've discovered that small, targeted, relevant *text* ads not only don't annoy people, they actually get better click-thru rates. And the people who click through are actually interested in the advertised products. Go figure.
Targetting is the key. Relevance is the key. Not annoying me with blinking flash crap is the very essense of the key.
Looking for a Rails developer in Chapel Hill?
So I read alot of posts, some intelligent others less so, and since this is an ask slashdot, I have an alternate solution for you, and pretty much any free/ad model site. Block them.
It is easy enough to detect what browser someone is using. If it is one that includes a pop-up or ad blocker, block them. Devise a test for Norton 2004 and block them. Block anyone who does not agree to participate in your business. As many have said, they have the right to opt out of your ads, you also have the right to opt out of doing business with them. Do not send them your content. If enough free/ad sites start to do this, people will notice. Hotmail/Yahoo, CNN, ESPN, and yes slashdot have banner or other ads. If those sites, and many others, dropped off of my internet I would, in fact, care. Hell, it would drive me away from whole pieces of software. Block them.
Maybe I am vindictive, but maybe this is what people are asking for. Do not send content to people who can't be bothered to "pay" for it. Do that, and you save your business model. The people you block weren't making you any money anyway.
Oh yeah, but in doing so, put up a page they will directed to informing them why they cannot see the main page. "You are seeing this message because you are trying to freeload off of me. Disable or uninstall any ad blocking software to view this webpage." That way, Norton will get lots of Customer Support calls about their anti-virus program "breaking the web". Enjoy!
I agree 100%. The reason I have set up aggressive ad blocking in Firebird is because I can't stand the hyperactive seizure-inducing multicolor flashing ads that have apparently become popular. Simple staic ads, I have no problem with. I even click on them from time to time if the advertised service sounds interesting. But the decision by some advertizers to go the "annoy the crap out of them" route has ruined it for everyone -- at least, as far as my eyeballs are concerned.
Personally I could not give a rats arse about banners (.gif or .jpg) on web sites.
What really shit me off are ones that constantly move, flash ones that make sounds and big arse chunky adds that look like something that they are not.
As an Australian, very few are relevant to me, those that I have clicked on in from Australian sites, I decided not to purchase anything because I was not interested in the product sufficiently or because it was to expensive from that source. I will not purchase anything from anyone that uses pop-ups, and am getting right shitted off with the sites that try and install spyware and their ilk. (I still use IE for my online comics because mozilla does not seem to overwrite the bookmark with the latest one, as I always read one day behind).
Death of the free internet, my arse! If I put shit up on a web page, its for people to read for free, not to have them pay for my server/bandwidth or time. (look at maddox.xmission.com -- no adds there)
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
Just like to mention that it's not Norton Antivirus, but Norton Internet Security and Norton Personal Firewall that seems to have this feature.
And what's more: NIS/NPF 2003 had this last year. I used it for a while, and it worked great. But to be honest, I've never been bothered by ads, so I turned it off (I rather have less taking up memory/CPU time than some piece of software block a few ads).
Now, pop up blocking? That's a different story... I'll definitely leave that setting in Firebird for that one.
Most people don't bother to write and say "Your banner ads annoy me." They simply stop visiting. If they are unobtrusive, then fine, but most advertising is FAR from unobtrusive and stick out like sore thumbs on ANY webpage. (Hence my very zealous use of Proxomitron.)
If you back and read my post, I said I only use Google ads. You should be able to guess what kind of ads they can tolerate:) Unlike a massive stonking banner ad, Google's can be tailored to fit almost any web design. Plus as text they're bandwidth friendly, and don't ruin the overall site design (which the majority of ads do. Like the huge one on the right hand side of Slashdot I noticed when I came here without my proxy on yesterday.
I believe this is a feature of Norton Internet Security (the consumer firewall product from Symantec), not NAV. Doesn't seem like a bad feature for a firewall . . . and you can turn it off and pull sites from the block list (in other words, create a whitelist). In fact, there is a little Web assistant thingy that lets you configure ad blocking on the fly. What NIS 2004 won't do however, is block the pieces of your sky from falling, IYKWIM.
The idea sounds really bizarre (and I honestly don't like the sound of it), but say a non-commercial site that runs through bandwidth faster than water really does count on every penny these banner ads generate, regardless of whether it can cover all of a server's costs alone (and their $18 t-shirts and $15 mousepads from CafePress aren't helping them out very much). Could sites like this simply deny surfers access if they detect that their ads have not been downloaded (via CGI or PHP scripts)?
So you are saying advertisers should gather information about you and track you. Are you sure you want this? I don't.
Ummm...careful there. SCO just might send you an "invoice" for the money you "owe" them for your usage of Linux, and with their "advertisers" tracking you, you'll be easy to find.
That sounds like a very specific list of features. Are you sure such a keyboard even exists? Ergonomic seems more for business users, and multimedia keys for home lusers. Keyboard manufacturers may not see a big enough user base to put both features in one keyboard--at least not with all the other features you mention.
I admit I didn't look very hard, but the closest I could come were: Zippy WK801 (not ergonomic) and Kinesis Advantage Pro USB (no multimedia keys). You won't be able to find something which doesn't exist. Perhaps someday there will be a service where you can custom order a product to your specific spec, but not today.
Though there has to be some sort of product search engine similar to the one described by you, but it is probably buried in the internet. I know of a few who search by the lowest price...
I've been doing this for years with my hosts file on both Windows and Linux. Granted, it blocks entire domains and not just the images but when would I REALLY want to go to gator.com or doubleclick.net, anyway? It also does a nice job of stopping malicious cookies and doesn't block my access to sites that support the second amendment and doesn't require product activation.
Don't know which hosts you should be blocking? Are you as lazy as I am? Download a windows installer or just use Mozilla or Firebird to right click on an image and select "Block images from ".
P.S. Would the original poster of this article please post the domain of the company he works for? I need to make sure it's in my block list. Thanks. -- Dave
I disagree. I think putting a non-paid-membership website out for all to see is more like a musician playing on a downtown sidewalk with a box at his feet for donations. Yes, it's definitely polite -- even civil -- to return his favor of entertainment with some sort of payment or reimbursement. But to call it an issue of a contract of some kind is really taking it too far.
You're absolutely right that professionally-produced sites won't survive without this source of revenue. But other posters have done a fine job of pointing out the market issues there (free riders, etc).
No, The parasite is the one who tries to foist their rubbish on those that do not want it. Subscription sounds better simply because you get what you want, not the crap that floats along with it like a parasite, which describes 80% of the content of the net or TV.
Its a shame Symantec decided to take on ad banners of all things. If they're going to take a stance on digital annoyances, where's their NAV signitures for spyware? Spyware is much more damaging than even the most obnoxious stupid java trick or Flash overkill.
Granted - they'd have to deal with the likes of Gator (or whatever cuddly name they've adopted now). After all, as others point out, Gator IS spyware.
that dont use lots of banners to get traffic/revenue ( www.sysclub.org ) ah.. but they don't make any/little money, they just have sex with each other... a well, if only I hade a date....
I think the real problem was with pop-ups, pop-unders, and then screen taker overs.
Banners are quite unabtrusive with todays massive screens take up very little space.
Ad blocking became popular with the onset of massivly annoying adds.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Users that block ads have already shown that they aren't interested in the advertiser's message. It is then inappropriate for web-sites to charge for advertising to these users. In any case, I agree that the all filtering products should contain an Off switch. (From a competing developer :)
http://FilterGate.com
I have a few sites that have advertisements. Not banners, but links and content that I have for people to advertise their sites.
What I am working on is a system that will check if people are blocking the advertisements, if they are, they access a page that requires them to turn off the ad blocking software.
In my opinion, if people want to view my site, and view my content/code/software that I don't charge for, they should help me out with a few nickels and dimes here and there.
If they don't want to see the banners that buy me beer, then I really have no need to give them access to my resources.
That's my thoughts on the matter.
TruePunk | Games
I am in charge of the network and internet connectivity at a medium sized hospital. We block ads at the firewall (SurfControl - I'm working on a better solution).
Way too many web bugs, spyware, etc. You have no idea the trouble that a clueless end user can cause by hitting "OK" when some ad pops up "Install me". Any of our web frontend applications can have unpredictable results when Gator or some similar app sticks itself in the middle of things. It would be great if we could turn up the security settings on IE (thanks vendors for requiring IE if we want support) without breaking the applications.
If advertisers could be trusted, it wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately most companies want to use the whores that can give them the most intrusive ads possible.
HIPPA is a nightmare, and anything that can remotely be considered a security problem has to go. PERIOD.
Yahoo was not at yahoo.stanford.edu, it was at akebono.stanford.edu. At the time, it was hosted by an educational institution. This is not a permanant solution. Banner ads are necessary (yet probably not sufficient) to maintain the content of the Internet as we know it. The sheer magnitude of the internet a-la 1994 was probably 1/1000000th of that which is availiable today. Try supporting that without commercial support... It ain't gonna happen...
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....
Not only is TV passive and patronizing but it expensive to produce for, limited in content providers, limited gatekeepers.
The web seems to be moving that direction, but as long as there is choice in browsers (!) there can't be a complete TV-ization of the Internet.
*gulp*
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I'm sorry, what Internet are you using? The one I've got costs $45 a month for a 1500/128 DSL line.
"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."
I'm going to give you a big "FUCK YOU" here. Ads are being forced on ME -- I can't go anywhere on the Net without looking at them. I do not consent to view these ads, so there is no "tortious interference with contract" here. Webmasters and internet-based companies need to look elsewhere to try to earn revenue, because you can best be sure that I'm not going to put up with this shit any longer.
If I pay for my connection to the Internet, I can do whatever the hell I want to do with the downloaded content, including refusing to download ads.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Banner ads are still quite effective, if they're done right. Look at (for instance) penny-arcade or PvP Online - they're both good examples of sites that use advertising effectively. I've gone to PvP a couple times and noticed they had ads drawn by the comic's artist. I looked at them, and clicked through. Sometimes, on PA, I'll frequently just click on an add because it's interesting-looking - they're often designed around the site's theme, and with the interests of the viewers in mind: gadgets, comics, games, and other things we geeks like.
Additionally, PA suppliments this ad income with things like tshirts, a hillarious comic, writeups, a tip jar, and the like. As near as I can tell, these guys live off the site.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
Jakob Nielsen wrote a nice article about why advertising doesn't work on the web in September of 1997. It's still true. The web isn't TV. People aren't passively watching the screen. They are actively reading and searching for information (or amusement). Anything that slows that process down will be at least ignored, if not actively blocked. As evidence, take a look at long term ad banner click through rates. They fall by a factor of 2 about every 18 months.
I personally use the Adblock plug-in for Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird. Before Adblock I used to leave Flash uninstalled so I wouldn't be distracted by blinking flashing ads. Now I just don't see them, and in fact, don't even download them.
James
In Norton Internet Security 2003 it is possible to allow advertising from specific sites. I quote:
Of course, Joe User is never going to get to page 169 of the users guide, and even if he did he probably wouldn't change the defaults even if he understood how.Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
Fine. They go elsewhere, find out their new provider can't force their ads through and do it again. (After all, if you try avoiding the keywords, Symantec will just adjust their tests to match.) How many times will they spemd the money to move their site before they figure out that they're wasting money because nobody can do what they want? And, for every customer you lose this way, you'll probably end up with another one moving for the same reason. You can probably stop most of your clients from leaving by pointing this out, and the ones that go anyway were probably more trouble than they were worth in the long run.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
As far as i know, these ad blockers only block images right? Couldnt someone whip up a java applet that rotates banners? Or a Flash application for that matter.
--vrwarp
1) Find a way to detect when NAV2004 is used to block ads on your site.
2) Use this technique to calculate how much revenue you've lost due to NAV2004.
3) Send bill to Symantec and demand they reimburse you for revenue lost due to their product.
4) ???
5) Profit!!!
This will make things quite a bit harder for news carriers that don't have big budgets behind them (read: alternative news). Then there are those information sites on various topics.
I work with a website dealing with the urban music scene back home in Hawaii. Right now we just pay everything out of pocket, but as our traffic is starting to increase quite a bit, we've been thinking about getting paid advertisers (nightclubs, record labels, clothing etc.) but the widespread use of this kind of software would kill that idea. Unless... we just find advertisers that are unaware of this happening.
I personally don't mind banners for the most part, it's the damn popups that I don't like. For the banners that irritate me (gator, doubleclick etc.), I just put thier adserver hostname in my hosts file directed to 127.0.0.1.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
The Bandwidth Fairy has been assumed to exist for years now by the masses of people who refuse to look at any form of advertisment. They either think the sites can magically keep running or they're just leeches that assume if one host dies another will come along anyway.
Which is fine.
"unless you can actually point to a particular website with that model, that is succeeding."
FilePlanet, SomethingAwful, CNN, GameSpot, ad nauseum realized long ago that ads can only cover so much revenue as they've been reduced to the effectiveness of Spam. And so they successfully switched to another business model that's been tried and true for centuries; charge the customers.
If customers don't want to be sponsered by major companies then they can sponser themselves.
I've never even bothered with seriously trying to make money with ads. I tried setting up a non annoying system of text based ads which got plenty of click thrus but no revenue. After awhile I could barely use my own internet connection to surf the internet my server was so busy. But no money.
I switched to an "All Access Pass" system and Voila! Money comes in and my bandwidth is restored. My server now runs with colocation instead of out of house.
Ads are now used simply for exposure. I don't get paid to post them and I only post ads for sites/companies I have personal experience with and like. I may eventually charge but it's really a non issue. Ads don't pay the bills. Paying customers do and blocking htaccess popups isn't going to get you free content.
My rule for decided what is and isn't free is very simple: does it take up lots of bandwidth? If not, then it's free. If it does, it's set up for paid access only.
Many site owners would rather let their site die and go into debt than charge the customers for even a portion of their site. Personally, I have far more of a problem with being a corporate whore. So really, site owners need to pick their poision and recognize the pros and cons of whatever they choose and take into consideration what they're trying to sell.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Examples:
The moment every site has the ads as the file www.company.com/djghsk/gdsfd.gif in non-standard/split sizes (e.g. sizes that get a lot of collateral damage), 99% of todays blocking approaches disappear.
For now, us tech-savvy people can block ads.. but don't expect it to last.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Reduces the ads to just about none (bunch of 404's) Yah, ok - I may be missing out on some things, but honestly, disable DNS and *poof*
Ma gavte la nata
before Norton starts accepting payements to switch off this facility for specially "chosen and vetted" sites?
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
>>I do not consent to view these ads
What do you call it when you go to a site that has banner ads? I would call that consent to view what they are sending you. They are not forcing you to go there, if you don't want to see ads then don't go to sites supported with them. Easy, isn't it?
I'd rather an option for NAV to treat all P2P software as a virus in our student labs. IM apps too.
When was the last time you clicked on a banner? Really? Even on Slashdot (a site you more than likely WANT to support)?
Perhaps most people on most sites. My site has only increased from a few hundred users to nearly 10,000. Many of the users on the website have been participating in the forum since the day it was opened.
If they are unobtrusive, then fine, but most advertising is FAR from unobtrusive and stick out like sore thumbs on ANY webpage.
So it seems to me your qualm is with obtrusive, distractive advertising more than it is with banner ads.
I'd personally prefer an easy-to-ignore banner at the top of the page than to find even a text ad buried in the middle of the content as I scroll down.
Like the huge one on the right hand side of Slashdot I noticed when I came here without my proxy on yesterday.
I agree with you 100%. I don't use any ad-blocking software and just have pop-ups disabled in Mozilla. I don't bother to block ads but when they are as annoying as that long skinny thing on the right-hand side of Slashdot I immediately clicked "Don't load images from this server."
So I agree. You have to maintain a balance. But I don't think there is anything wrong with a moderate and well-planned use of banner ads.
That the /. relationship page really needs to be modified.
I really dont think I need to mark a lot of these folks as foes, but I'd really love to see:
( ) Friend
( ) Neutral [ Yup, I'm positive ]
( ) Foe
( ) Fool
( ) Annoyance [ Really Super Positive ]
( ) Idiot
I mean, we all have friends that we consider idiots.
s'wut i sed.
The time of banner ads was over long ago. Smart webmasters with a big audience moved over to collecting and selling data on their visitors to those who stayed in ad market. That will soon come to an end too. Now, stop complaining about all that and think: what could you get from a website, that can be sold to those who stay behind in the market of collecting data on their visitors? Figure that and you open the next market, make your money, and move on again before the others.
If you can't do that, then you need to get around the ad blockers. Use tables instead of images. Use words that Norton doesn't catch. Place your ads in unexpected places on your pages. Read up on how spammers try to defeat filters (and vice versa) and see what ideas can be useful to you. When you figure how to defeat the blockers, sell the method; that's more lucrative than just using it.
I think it's more that the internet has succeeded inspite of the broad based comercial uses. Sure B2B stuff has been huge but I wish all the low level consumer commercialization would just go away.
Well, there is nothing wrong with non-obtrusive, non-distracting banner ads...but those are not the banners that have created the hatred and the anti-ad software. I, like many I know, have issues trying to actually read the article content on a page while a banner is constantly flashing, popping, moving, or whatever, while you are reading. If ads were not such a headache causer for a user, I am sure this would not even be an issue. I remember static ads for years on the internet, and no one ever really complained about them. But it hasn't been until the pop-ups and continuous bombardment of motion pictions has it been an issue, I mean some have so many pop-ups you can't even find the desktop >:( :D
So, as long as these blockers are just blocking the anoying ones, I don't really care...but we know that won't be the case, so I am going to have to care...oh wait, I use Linux and mozilla so I don't have to worry about pop-ups OR anti-virus software
Lynx has been blocking ads for years! Most of the new browsers have a feature to turn images off, too. I know IE has had it since at least 3.x
I think I've clicked on a banner ad maybe 3 times my whole life. And those were all probably ads for games that caught my eye and then I went about browsing again, not purchasing the games then and there. Ads are a joke these days, expecially on TV. I wish people would find a new business model.
-]Phreak Out[-
Targeted ads.
Not targeted to web-site conent but to users.
Basicly, you go to the ad company web-site and pick from a range of different "types" of ads (e.g. ads for computer stuff or whatever). Then, anytime you visit a site with the particular providers ads on it, you only get ads from your particular category.
The problem with this I guess is that the categories that are likely to be the most popular arent the ones that bring in the most $$$.
For example, Online Casinos bring in $$$. As do Credit Card companies trying to get you to sign up for their card. And games companies offering promoting the latest "same game as last year with a new name" crap. (although that usually only happens on games related sites). Plus, technology companies (usually those selling tech like dell or whoever) And probobly some others (thanks to Mozilla I dont see many ads)
We have done all of our Christmas shopping online since 1999. I purchase all of my music online. My wife has outfitted 3 children with clothes purchased online. I get all of my digital prints processed through a company online. We order our fucking pizza and groceries online. I spend more and more money online every year.....and guess what -- I have NEVER ever ever clicked on an anoyying banner add.
If you don't have a product to market -- and want to get online to share your content -- chances are, you are going to have costs. Looking for a solution as simple as placing annoying and ugly banner ads on your page may seem a simple solution...but it is plain ugly and akin to the same SPAM that flows into your mailbox and frustrates you.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Actually, I agree with the article in that its simply in tolerable that NAV- in it's own way- is censoring the internet. Is this feature optional? If not, this product should be changed. I love Norton for their AV products, but I don't think that they should control what we can and cannot view.
- Code Dark
Jar Jar Binks. Is that you?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I'm already paying $50 or so per month for broadband. In addition to getting faster Internet access and the ability to put up a mail server that literally has my name on it, I run three websites (one personal, two non-profit) on it. The marginal cost of serving up tese websites is zero...whether I'm serving up these sites or not, I'm still paying for the connection.
As for corporate websites...it's also likely that they would need a fat pipe for other uses anyway as well.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Perhaps a 'Google P2P'. Think about it.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
I think you made the anti-point. I DO pay for commercial free TV yet I STILL get advertising; whether it be for a sister cable channel (usually asking me to subscribe)or by the telemarketers who know my subscription status and try to sell me on the same subscription to the same sister channel. I agree with your 'food-chain' statement but they should be at the bottom, not the top.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
I agree with your point. But let's take this argument one step further. The choice to buy the product advertised is also the consumer's. That's the nice thing about the internet--that is, information when they want it, how they want it. Stop worrying about advertising to the masses and "getting that one hit." If the consumer wants to buy your product, he or she will eventually search for it on the internet. You should only worry about your product showing up in the search engines. I concede, spam may work because, well, it's spam...but I would venture a guess that you can get the same results that you get with mass marketing without the mass marketing tactics, you just have to be smart about who to market to---and the tools to do this targeted markting are increasing by the minute. There was a nice recent article in the NY Times about this very topic of direct/targeted marketing and using statistics to gain more insight of the results.
Linux at home
Personally, I like the idea. I use a software firewall program that I have set up that removes banner ad images, replacing them instead with a blank image, based on keywords. Of course, this is not default behaviour -- I had to configure it to do so. But I can block almost all of Yahoo ads, ESPN ads, Fox News Channel ads, and even the ads of my beloved NRA. When people install a virus scanner, they expect it to block viruses. People don't automatically expect a virus scanner to start blocking content and filtering things automatically.
...
But that's IMHO
Seth Anderson BTW, I'm not 23 anymore -- I am TexasCowboy26 now. =)
Wow....you sound like the RIAA; the consumer is the parasite while YOU'RE the one doing the advertising. If you work for a website than you should already know the bandwidth should be in the operating cost of the business; if it's not...start looking for another job where they don't consider consumers parasites.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
Yes ads which are non obtrusive are ok I really would like to see obtrusive ads vanish from the face of the internet.
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
As far as the internet being free, that was a pipe-dream. Sooner or later it will be all subscription just like magazines and cable, at least for some sites. Most everything else will be free, but then most of the sites that will most likely stay free are garbage anyway, there are exceptions, but not many.
Personally I like this feature, not only because it blocks banner ads but because it screws with the principle of business uber alles. We could outlaw more and more things that make it difficult to do business on the web, or we can let the web evolve as it will and let people who want to do business on it solve their own problems.
The fact that people don't like to look at ads isn't the only thing that can hurt business. Competitors can have a bigger advertising budget. Someone can give away something free that obsoletes a pay product. It can be raining. Making the Internet a more difficult place to make money shouldn't be a crime, or even discouraged. If advertising completely disappeared from the Internet, I bet search engines would still enable people to find products they are interested in. In fact, if advertising disappeared from the whole world I bet people would somehow find what they need. And it wouldn't have the cost of attracting their attention added to it.
I'd say you're getting a signal that your business model is no longer valid. Regardless of whether you think it's fair or reasonable, your customers are telling you they don't want to see your advertising and now they don't have to.
It sounds very harsh, but it's time to adapt or die. You can say "naughty user" or "bad Symantec" all you like, and maybe even get a lot of people to agree with you, but that isn't going to solve your problem.
Actually there's another choice: you can try to leverage the legal system to extend the life of your business model. It may even work in these not-so-enlightened times.
I had a client that was using it and she was claiming that an entire section of her website was gone. Norton Internet Security 2003 was actually removing text links from her navigational menu. We changed the directory name and then there wasn't any problem... When it comes to banner blocking (with IE), I use AdShield 3 from http://AdShield.org It allows me to modify the block & exclude lists. Norton has no such control.
Another note on Norton: If you dynamically create support files (JS, CSS, RAM, ASX, etc) using ASP, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion... make sure that you change the mime type when delivering or Norton will detect that the file type doesn't actually match the expected mime type and simply block the file. No mention of this is in the documentation or on their website for developers. We had to file a complaint with Symantec in order to find out.
Of course it is good for the users sitting in front of their computers to be able to avoid annoying ad banners, and of course it is their "right" to decide what they want to watch and what they do not want to see on their screen - just like everybody has the right to go fetch a beer when the sports broadcast on TV is interrupted due to an ad break.
But users of an ad blocking software should be aware of what their decision to remove ads from their screens can result in.
Let's face it: hosting a web site, if it's not a private homepage but instead a popular one with loads of traffic, costs money. I don't want to do a calculation here, but from what I have heard from various gaming- and hardware-related web site owners, monthly costs are big enough that nobody who is not lucky enough to be the son of a millionaire wants to pay that money every month. So these web sites NEED money from sponsors. Of course these sponsors are not altruistic, they want something in return: they want to place ads, just like newspapers have ads and free TV has ad breaks. The only way to place ads on a web site is of course to somehow place the graphics there. If somebody now decides to use a software which removes the ads from the page shown on his computer, this does not hurt that much. But if EVERYBODY was to use such a software, the sponsors would soon realize that the ads placed on the web site are useless and would no longer sponsor it. Result: no more web site - since, as we figured out earlier, nobody wants to pay the full cost of hosting the web site if it's only a "hobby" one.
It's the same as with every standard newspaper. If somebody was to invent a $30 machine you throw a newspaper you just bought into and which then cut out all ads and pasted together the rest to give you a five page ad-free newspaper to read, nobody would place an ad in a newspaper anymore. A magazine I subscribed to recently mentioned (as a reply to a reader's letter complaining about the amount of advertising) that without the ads, the magazine would not cost $3.50, but instead $15 per issue. Nobody would buy it anymore.
Some say "find a different way of getting money to host your site". But what ARE these alternatives?
Finding a sponsor who does not want to place ads? Good luck finding one. ALL free web hosters want you to place ads on your page or do pop-up advertising. Subscription-based service? This might work, but it destroys diversity. Right now, I regularly read about ten hardware review pages. When some cool new hardware comes out, I read the reviews on all of these to get as many opinions as I can. If all these sites suddenly would go subscription based, do you honestly think I would subscribe to ALL of them? No, I would probably subscribe to one, or maybe even none at all (there ARE paper magazines, after all). If a user subscribes to one page with covers the things he is interested in, there is no reason for him to subscribe to another one. If one or two big subscription based web sites already exist for a subject, new sites would not really have a chance - to exist, they would need subscribers, but who would subscribe to a site which is a.) smaller than the existing, big, one, b.) not as well known and c.) probably bound to close its doors in half a year, anyway?
So this is what i think will happen if ad banner removal software becomes standard on most of the new machines sold:
- after a while, advertising companies will figure out that 70-80% of the home users do not see their ads
- ad-banner based free web hosting will disappear. Commercial web sites will switch to other forms of advertising, e.g. base everything on flash, with obvious results (web sites will no longer be viewable with web browsers not capable of flash)
- private web sites will either be forced to include flash advertising, too (e.g. enforced ad viewing before being forwarded to the "real" web site) or they would have to pay more money for hosting. Most high-traffic private web sites will have to close down,
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.
So what? They knew that this was a risk when they put the content up this way. No one EVER said that advertising was a good, or sustainable, or profitable thing. They took a risk, and if it isn't working then things will ultimately settle out to a level where they do work. That's fine. That's great. That's the natural order of things -- because businesses must cope or fail in accordance with the reality of the situation.
Propping up advertising by tolerating it when you don't want to is a terrible idea, and turns the businesses into parasites that are feeding on you.
Me, I filter every ad I come across. Banners, pop ups, pop unders, flash, text ads, annoying logos -- everything. I just wish that I could filter my perceptions so that I could look at a billboard and see nothing at all, or maybe a work of fine art. Something like 'They Live' glasses would be a start.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I can't believe the absolute drivel of the previous 11 replies. Just wanted to say I fully agree with you Greg!
Professional content costs money, and having to let a few ads pass into your field of vision for a few seconds is NOT too high a price to pay.
If someone doesn't want to see ads, he should commit himself to only viewing sites that don't have them.
banner ads are the result of a contract between publishers (of a website) and marketeers. The deal is, just as in magazines, the publisher prints, and gets money. The consumer, who is ultimately inconvenienced by this, is not part of this process, and is in his fullest right to get rid of offensive content. No matter if this is porn, violence, propaganda or advertising.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Advertising itself is a sign that the entire model of economic scarcity upwon which our society is built is out dated and needs to be replaced. However, until that happens.... ;-)
:-) But inline banner ads are (generally) no more intrusive than the commercials on your TV set or the game ads in your copy of PC Gamer. They're roughtly as effective, too. That is, one out of every thousand eyeball views may result in someone thinking about it, and one of every thousand people who thinks about it may consider buying it.
:-)
Take a look at the top of this page. There is a big banner ad up there. At the moment on my screen it's showing an ad for Comdex Las Vegas. Know why it's there? Because Taco needs to make a living., and Comdex is willing to pay him to insert their ad next to otherwise unprofitable but socially beneficial content. (Ok, some might debate the social benefit of Slashdot, but bear with me here.)
Pick up a copy of your local newspaper. I'll bet you a year's subscription that there are ads in it. A lot of them. Walt Mossberg is not going to get paid to review new geek toys unless someone is paying the Wall St. Journal to pay him. And no, subscription alone isn't enough. The 50 cents you pay for your local paper is a spit in the bucket that maybe covers the cost of the drivers to deliver the paper to mail boxes. An ad-free newspaper service would cost several dollars per issue, probably over $10/each.
Yes, advertising has gone too far in a lot of areas. Popunders are evil. I've not seen one in over a year, as I never use IE anymore.
"People don't want it, come up with some other business model!" Fine. How about Walt Mossberg's reviews are good only if the company pays the Journal $5,000 per product reviewed? How about if Slashdot editors deliberately reject any story that speaks well of SuSE but accept anything pro-Red Hat, because Red Hat pays them to do so? (Or vice versa, not to pick on RH here.) That's certainly a business model, and probably a very profitable one, too. Guess what, the MPAA is already there for sitcoms. Want the web to go that route, too?
Limited avertising is acceptable, given modern flawed economic models. It's excessive advertising that is a problem.
And the problem with Norton is that, no, it doesn't give users a choice. As another poster said, 90% of users won't know the difference. They won't know that they can turn it off, or that it's there in the first place. If the user wants to install an ad blocker, well, I can't stop them. But for a third party to sneak one in annoys me. How about when they sneak in one that, by default, blocks any pro-Linux or pro-Microsoft or pro-SCO or pro-Democrat or pro-Republican web sites?
Come on, guys. You don't like web site blockers, why do you like partial-site blockers?
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
they are exaggerated.
Until one week ago I was clicking to the banner ads on Slashdot to support it.
But I came across a page that was 200kb with a large banner ad. That's really huge for a user on dial-up like me.
So; now "ads.osdn.com" sits in my hosts file. It will stay there until I get a broadband connection or webmasters become reasonable.
less is more
Netscape has that convenient "block images from this server" option. It works quite well. I'm reading Slashdot without ads right now.
Banner ad filtering will cut your Internet traffic by about half. It's a huge win if you have limited bandwidth.
Amen. And take Usenet for example - ads banned, communication flourishes. And barring trolls and spammers signal/kB ratio tends to be quite a bit higher than on the web.
I admit I did not read all of the replys in this thread, but since this is a hot button topic for me I felt the need to point out a couple of things.
/. subscriber.
First off Norton software has a really bad track record with me because when Win95 launched Microsoft gave Symantic enough hooks in the code to make a partnership worthwhile. Things have changed between the two companys since then. Symantic has been embraced and extended by Microsoft and is pretty desperate right now. I saw copys of Systemworks for free via rebate at Fries.
Also I can attest that Symantic software aimed at joe six-pack user is absolute crap. I have seen more systems compromised by this bloatware than I have ever seen helped.
On the ad blocking issue: Banner ads are fine. Any other bullshit flash or those really annoying three inch box ads get blocked and I sleep comfortable at night because I am a
What's actually wrong here is that advertisers are WRONGLY assuming that shoving intrusive ads at people who don't want them is going to be good for them.
If I block your advert without ever seeing it, your company hasn't annoyed me.
If I don't, you have annoyed me.
If you annoy me, I don't buy from you.
Blindingly obvious, I know, but advertisers seem to think that any sort of recognition is good. That online casino spent a fortune indellibly associating the word "scum" with the number 888 in my mind, whereas I've never seen a single advert for the online betting agency I used once. Who has the better business model?
When E-bay turned userfriendly.org into an animated mess with a cartoon hidden in it, my response was to delete my E-bay bookmark. They paid to lose a customer!
Compare this to whoever is paying for the blank rectangle I'm seeing on this page. They didn't annoy me so I'm not avoiding them. This is a BETTER outcome for them.
While I'm ranting, how would this E-bay advert EVER have worked? It could only get them a new customer if the reader was someone was geeky enough to enjoy a cartoon with unix in-jokes, but not net-savvy enough to have heard of E-bay AND wasn't offended by having 50% of the screen garishly dancing around while they tried to concentrate on the small black and white cartoon in the middle.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
atguard (firewall + adblocker + anonymizer) was a great product. Until symantic bought it and it became desupported. It has isses with XP and the adblocker is not up to date.
Besides a firewall it already had an adblocker. That feature was not in symantic firewall. I am supprised it took them 3 years to include this feature into their product.
> We all hate advertisements, but as with public TV, it's the reason we can get it for free . . .
No, public TV is not free. You incur the cost of watching ads every time you turn it on. Likewise you incur a cost when you have to look at inline ads and popups all over the Internet.
Ad blockers like Norton and TiVo are going to change how we pay for content on the Internet and TV. Instead of implicitly paying by enduring ads, we'll eventually pay explicity, with real money.
I much prefer this model -- it gives me the power to express how much value I attach to content.
It won't be long before the banner ads will be placed in the html so that they're indistinguishable from decorative pictures. I'm talking about both the html keywording as well as the layout part. So long for simple regex banner blocking.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
Well.. I read a lot of comments about this subject.. /. has banner on the top.. and if /. got money for it.. well, I say put 2 more, /. just deserve it!
/. only if you pay for it, would you?
I belive, some site need to use banners to stay free, and some people need it, some not.
So let's leave the choice to the people.. if you are hate banners, do not go to site which use them, but dont want to stop them..
Many people dont care about it, some site use good ad-banner engine, which try to give you correct ad.. some site annoying.. even
If you can read
About norton: It is not fair to do any modification in a personal computer without asking the owner. Use defaults, but ask about it!
There is only one good solution: The simpliest!
I don't actually mind banner ads one bit and use them myself, working them into the actual design of a site. I think the trick is to ensure that they're part of the site, much like their paper counterparts.
If the owner of a site is happy using them and doesn't mind people being put off by seizure-inducing colours (if they're stupid enough to use those particular ads) then that's fine, it's part of their site design and should be treated as such.
If NAV2004 strips them then they're censoring websites to some extent, or modifying a published work, however you want to see it. I can see a class-action lawsuit in the making here because Symantec are preventing people from earning. I predict the Ad-Blocking will be turned off in a future round of LiveUpdate.
President of the In
Y'see, this is where you get it wrong. You'd like to think there's an implicit agreement, or get people to believe there is. But there isn't...
You also haven't understood that your value and importance to your customers has been considerably reduced by the obnoxious tricks you and your bretheren perform in an attempt to ensure ads hit eyeballs. You're still blaming your customers for being pissed off with your actions and doing something about it, rather than blaming yourselves for pissing them off in the first place...
You say you can't survive without advertising? Fine. I'm not interested in propping you up. Die.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
... of course nobody likes banners, but for many sites it is a large part of or the only means of revenue ...
That is blatantly not true and one of the reasons everybody hates banners... because everybody uses (and abuses) them... for a few dollars more.
Why is it not true? - Because ads are used as a supplementary income to some other business which is usually the primary business of the company. If you have a webpage where people can order some item, you don't need any ads in addition to the promotion of the item itself. The cost of the webpage should be covered by the revenue on the item sale, not by additional ads. And similar for any other sale, whether the item is a tangible object or a service.
The only type of page not covered by either the above or the standard publication cost of research institutions are the personal webpages usually offered by ISPs, but there the cost of these should be a part of the fee, not a 'free' ad-ridden service.
Actually only specialized 'free' services like free webspace and similar should have a need for ads. Those ads would have been much more efficient if people didn't hate ads so much and thus didn't utilize ad-blocking software.
I myself use Mozilla Firebird with The Proxomitron for that ad-free web experience. I've had my attention and focus hijacked once too many times to tolerate ads when I surf the web. Sorry people, but life's too short to waste on wading through gazillions of flashing, lying and annoying ads.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
All this boils down to the fact that there are two kinds of advertising: Good and Evil.
Evil ads include ones that take a long time to download, that pop-up, that are animated, that are deceptive, that track you with cookies, that insult you etc.
Good ads are simple, low bandwidth and straight to the point. Google text ads are a perfect example, but an even better one would be the independant review. When I buy something, I tend to look around for reviews of all the products on the market first. Having a well designed and easily accessable site also helps as I can then compare prices that much easier (if you web site is hard to use I'll just give up).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
One could say that if you don't want to be bombarded with ads, just don't go to sites that do that. It is really that simple.
But then there's the other way around: I decide what gets downloaded on my system, and it is in my rights to block content I do not want.
Both of these arguments have merit. But what we don't need are blanket statements and black/white solutions. Without ads, a lot of content simply wouldn't be available today. It is a way to publish content on the web and cover the cost, or even make money. If everyone blocks all ads, what happens to sites that rely on ad revenue to survive?
Clever signature text goes here.
Thank you for proving my point. Translating into US$, that's 42GB/month for about $45 a month -- $1 per GB.
No that doesn't prove your point - it only serves to show how little you know or seem to be able to understand - that INCLUDES 40GB of space (rather than costing, as you said, '1/month/100MB of space') and of course the physical the dedicated server itself (which you get to keep).
According to your suggested pricing the whole lot would cost in the region of 450 USD per month, not 45 USD.
If the advertisers would stop bitching and do something constructive for a change this wouldn't be a problem. The larger advertisers need to get together and throw some resources into a pot and develop their own, legitimate, anti-virus software (WITHOUT banner-ads and spyware) and distribute this software as honest-to-god FREEWARE. By distributing the antivirus software freely, they can ensure a wide distribution of antivirus software that DOES NOT include ad-blocking functionality. They win, the consumer wins, everyone's happy except Symantec who see their NAV sales volume decline as a direct result of the free-Antivirus initiative orchestrated by the pissed off advertisers. It would have to be quality software and perform well even though its free, but if the advertisers are really concerned about their ads, this shouldn't be a problem.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
You'll lose business though, and maybe someone needs to try it and go out of business in doing so; however they will have the satisfaction of having stopped freeloaders reading their precious content.
/. will be forced to become ad-blocker-hostile or go subscription-only?
With ad-blocker's, an ad-supported content site owner has already lost the business, but not lost the cost of the freeloaders. When ad-blocking was rare, site owners could afford to ignore it. But if every new PC contains default-on ad-blocking, then they must respond.
Hmmm.... I wonder when
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I find this whole "we need to pester you" argument a hard pill to swallow. TV is also a horrible example to use, I have every channel under the sun and still have my time wasted with commercials. If your site depends on all your popups and banners and other annoying ads, your business model sucks and/or you need to fess up to needing that extra chumpchange for the real dirty swedish porn sites.
Granted this call should be in the hands of the consumer, but I'm still glad to see things wiping away some of the crap we have to endure.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
I haven't tested this myself, but recently some users of my site have reported that they can no longer see gallery images (but can see all the other images on the site).
1 00&h=100" width=100 height=100>
I suspect that this is because the new version of Norton blocks the images because the path they are in contains the word "adverts" - or perhaps because the images are requested using information in a query string:
eg: <img src="images/adverts/thumbnail.aspx?img=foo.gif&w=
Unfortunatly - these are not actually 'adverts' - they are content uploaded by the users of the site (conference venues) to help other users (conference organisers) see pictures of their converence venue.
Now I'm going to have to recode the site so that it uses a different folder and doesn't pass information in the query string! GRRRR!
8. You can also ask for a password that is provided in one banner.
Good one, BlueYoshi. Some more:
9. create a content-for-clickthroughs model - veiwers that click-through gain access to more content (100 pageviews/clickthrough?).
10. outsource all staff to India to offset declining ad-revenue.
11. merge your content site with a retailer's site.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I find this attitude really amusing. If you took away advertising and then every web site that didn't make a profit shut down, what exactly do you think would be left?
"No only do I, for example, get my 2 MB ADSL for 70 UKP Month"
:)
Good for you. I get 768k down/128k up for about $90 a month because it's a business account (the only way I can get a static IP and run a server).
Aside from the fact that it's not cheap, 128k up won't serve shit. It works for me because my web site doesn't get a lot of hits and mainly exists for my own use.
I checked into business class cable services in my area and they were more expensive.
Before someone points it out to me, I know I could save money by downgrading my DSL to residential service and finding a good hosting company but that's just not as fun.
I think one of the main problems with advertising on the Internet is that we, the webmasters and content providers, do not take enough resposibility for what that they, the advertisers and spammers, thrust upon the consumer.
I am a heavy user of the Internet for personal use as well as business use. I find many advertisements make me cringe (esp the gambling ones). I rarely run into adult content ads now, but there are plenty of ads that I can do without. A system in place that allows the ads to be filtered for the end user - that is the Internet experience.
And, we need to police the content and frequency of those ads better. On TV, you get ads every so often (5 to 15 minutes), yet on the Internet, you tend to get ads on every page. The small ads do not cause enough pain to complain about (unless the subject matter is off for the individual viewer), but the in your face ads are enough for people to stop using a site.
People may think that their lives are complicated enough without having to monitor the content of what other people are providing on a site. Consider the view of the consumer. This is your site, and you(we) are allowing the advertisers to post their ads. In the view of the end user, we are just as guilty as the advertiser is.
On all of our sites, all advertising is served from our servers, and all advertising is reviewed before placement. We do not make quite as much per ad, but we do have great content control (including an internal rating system that allows parents to control what can be advertised to them).
As we go forward, people will be more and more selective about what they are willing to see. Since we (and the advertisers) are really providing a service, we need to learn to adjust to the demands of the consumer. After all, they are the ones who choose whether or not to make our advertising dollars worthwhile to the advertisers.
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
If banner ads and the like become unprofitable, online retailers will start providing content services to tempt traffic to their wares. Some of the content will be related to what's for sale. For example, the home improvement chains regularly promote classes and guides on home improvement projects. Other content sites will simply exist to remind you to shop at the sponsoring retailer. For example, we might expect to see a news site called Your-Favorite-Book-Retailer's News (.com). Expect to see pure content producers, such as magazine publishers, move to the "Search-the-Book (ala Amazon.com), but pay for the full content" model.
We might also see consortiums of smaller manufacturers or trade groups sponsoring content sites. Think "MP3.com, brought to you by the Small Electronics Trade Association." Some content sites may not be explicitly commercially sponsored; they may use the PBS/NPR underwriting model extended to content sites. Think "Astronomy.com, underwritten by the Ford Foundation and brought to you by readers like you."
Finally, we still have yet to see the type of banner advertising so common in sports events: simple branding by manufacturers, restaurant chains, and service companies on fixed signs. If McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and other heavyweights use more banner advertising, we may see banners that are really hard to filter; because, the ad images are just part of the site, itself. These branding ads may not even be linked; they may depend solely on you seeing and recognizing the brand name to be effective.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
> If I see an ad and choose to explore it and purchase a product
Impulse buying is what puts people in debt. If I am going to buy something, I know where to look for it. I don't need a giant flash animation telling me I can buy my widgets at widget-and-gizmo-fetish.com.
You don't seem to realize that you are in the very VERY small minority who likes ads. I pay $15 a month to get on the internet, why should I have to pay to watch adverts for crap I don't want (and for some ppl, they find it offensive). Granted, I feel the same way about Cable TV.
I'm 100% behind Symantec on this. They are giving the customer what they want. That is what businesses are supposed to do! The customer does not want to look at advertisements, they want to find porn without a billion popups, dan't you? I mean, what is the Internet, if not Slashdot and porn? Oh, and drivers, the 'Net is invaluable for those. Err, music, movies, games... but I undress, er digress.
So there are two extremes possible here, with reality probably somewhere in between:
What I'm trying to say here is that the advertiser can't tell the difference between these two scenarios. This makes banner ads in the presence of ad-blocking technology essentially equivalent to TV advertising.
The fact that it is sometimes possible to determine if an ad was served means that banner ads are a *better* advertising medium than TV, except for the fact that the web is less ubiquitous than TV. A TV advertiser has no way of knowing if I saw his ad, or if I fast forwarded though a recording of the TV program. No one is predicting the death of TV, so I think that predictions of doom for the web are a bit premature.
I salute our new advertising-free overlords.
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
I think you can place the prisoner's dilemma here in two ways. Between two web user's or between the user and the advertiser.
The case between web user's has been discussed here, but I didn't see anything about the other case.
I agree, this is a bit simplified and twists the dilemma, but I think it still works.
The advertiser can make normal nice adds (like normal banners and those in Google) or he can make pop-(up|under|in)s and flash and whatnot. Co-operate and compete, respectively.
The user on the other hand can either load the adds or block them. Co-operate and compete, respectively again.
Both can co-operate, advertisers use sensible adds and user's don't get irritated enough to block them. The may get banner blindness, but at least the adds are there and they have been noticed on some level. No different from any other advertisement, in newspapers and television.
If the user chooses to compete by blocking the adds, the advertiser is left with no choice but to make nasty adds so that the rest of the people would notice them better.
If the advertiser chooses to use annoying adds, the user gets annoyed and starts to seek a solution. So he blocks the adds.
You can co-operate and keep both relatively happy or you can compete and both lose (in the long run).
And as you would expect from business, they opted for the version, which could bring them more money in short term.
And what I do to adds? I don't actively block them. I just surf with Opera and have plug-ins, GIF animation and JavaScript turned off. Also, I only show cached images. Ad-blocking comes as (sometimes not wanted) side-effect for keeping myself sane.
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.
/. and Google that derive much of their income from ad revenues).
/. and Google.
Yes, but there are implications attached to the exercise of those rights. If 5% of web users block ads, its no big deal. But if 95% of web users block ads (which will happen in a few years as people move to PCs with Norton 2004), the business models of a number of very valuable web resources go with it (I'm thinking of sites like
Maybe Google will find an alternate model (subscription-access, ads comingled with search hits, or sell itself to Microsoft), maybe it won't. Personally, I don't think that any of these alternatives are better (for me and other Googlers) than the current ad-supported model. So if ubiquitous ad-blockering occurs, I will be saddened by the changes that it forces on sites like
What upsets me the most is that I see small ad-supported sites as the most likely victims of ad-blocking. Big sites will have the technical resources and marketshare to battle ad-blocking. Small sites won't and will see ad-revenues dwindle. Big retailers will win over small ones. People will turn-off ad-blocking when shopping at brand-name sites (like HP) and leave smaller sites that are also broken by ad-blocking. Therefore, ad-blocking will encourage the further consolidation of the web into a few big companies whose dominance ensures that they have the technical means or marketing might to circumvent ad-blocking.
Site owners are culpable in this mess, too. To judge by the virtiol expressed about ads in this thread, site owners have overstepped the bounds of civility with agressive advertizing tactics like pop-ups, pop-unders, and obnoxious ad graphics. Site owners have a right to put those ads on their site, but maybe site owners should not have exercised those rights.
Everyone has rights: consumers can block ads and site owners can put in more obnoxious ads. But too few people on both sides will take responsibility, or even think about, the changes wrought by the widespread exercise of those rights.
(BTW, for the record, I don't run an ad-supported site; I don't block online ads; I do click-through on some ads that interest me on some sites that I wish to support, I don't share files online; and I do skip over most, but not all, TV commericals.)
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
If you took away advertising and then every web site that didn't make a profit shut down, what exactly do you think would be left?
A whole lot. Every business around now knows that they need a web site to stay in business. Every university has and has had a web site for quite a while. I don't think that they make any money off of them. People who just like to have a web site for the heck of it and thousands of other web sites that don't need advertising.
You're assuming that if you were able to magically take all advertising down, that those web sites would HAVE to shut down. It's just not true. I doubt that slashdot would shut down. It's too popular and too potentially profitable for them to do that. They would find a way to charge people to stay open. If they can't figure it out, then they're simply poor businessmen.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
"...I would call that consent to view what they are sending you..."
Or, in my case, what they are not being allowed to send to me. I consent to have a big blank space where there should be a banner.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
The faster you and your ilk die off, the faster and efficient the internet will be, and the content will improve, or at least stay the same.
This one poster runs a site, as pointed out by other posters, which has virtually no recognition yet brings in billions of hits and uses millions of dollars (Doing what, I'm not sure) to produce it.
How, when these millions of dollars are gone, will the site continue to exist? It will not. Vast arrays of content on the internet are produced by people paid to do it. Not paid with wishes, and happy viewers. Paid with dollars, that come from advertisements.
The exact same thing happens on television. TV stars earning a million dollars an episodes don't get it from the smiles or tears they put on our faces. They get it from the advertisers paying for the space. Do you truly believe all of television will remain, were we to eliminate all advertising support? We'd be left with PBS and a few premium stations.
I block pop up/unders because they are too intrusive. I love the idea that a 468x80 pixel part of my screen has paid for me seeing the rest of the site, rather than having to fork my cash over for it.
Health is simply dying at the slowest rate possible.
I hate to break it to you, but sites that have tried getting people to pay for the content or donate to defray costs have failed miserably, because people simply don't pay. Ads are the only way to get them to. Sure, it may be built into the cost of nearly everything you buy, but otherwise people won't pay for the content.
Take you, for instance. You're adding to Slashdot's costs, but you're not paying them for it as you claim you would, since you're not a subscriber.
Nice to see that you post under your own familiar name too; oh wait, you're an Anonymous Coward... explain why anything you write deserves any respect at all.
I guess you're another one of the parasites that wants everything for free, but doesn't want to see any ads.
> With ad-blocker's, an ad-supported content site owner has already lost the business
/.'s primary business is now an advertising site with a bit of content as a sideline. If that's what /. has degraded to, let it block the ad blockers and I'll quite happily take my eyeballs off to the Register or somewhere else. /. hasn't lost my business because I've blocked the ads, it's kept my business because I could block them.
/. blocks ad-blockers, then it will lose the business unless the ads become non-invasive. That means going back to non-animated banner ads - I don't mind looking at them cos they're not trying to draw my eyes from the content - I can glance at one of those, mutter something like "no, don't need a router today (unnecessary for home, not net admin at work)" and get on with reading the site. But now it's read a word - MUST NOT LOOK AT AD AGAIN - read another word - DAMN THAT FLASHY AD - read again, phew, have now scrolled that annoying ad off the screen.
/.'s ads since they became annoying. When they were a static banner ad at the top of the page, since they were usually relevant, I looked at them, read them, and in the case of the thinkgeek ads clicked through and often bought stuff. Now they're big fuck-off ads in the way that fill half the screen after about half a line of story, rather like Sky where you get about a microsecond of story followed by 15 hours of adverts, then another microsecond of story, then another 15 hours of adverts......bollocks to the lot of them.
No, they keep the business, even if they've lost the original vision of what they are about. Slashdot is "news for nerds, stuff that matters" as I remember, not "ads for nerds, stuff that costs money". Ads are a sideline to raise cash for the content, but you are implying
If
I have only blocked
It's called "shooting yourself in the foot"... or perhaps even more aptly "cutting off your nose to spite your face". At least for those countermeasures that make it harder to see your content.
What was the point of putting up my website, again?
Sean
This feature has been included with NIS since before they bought the firewall from AtGuard, and it's been the leading reason behind my choice of firewalls. While putting loopbacks in your host file works just as well, it's far less convenient than dragging it to the "Ad Trashcan" in the Norton Internet Security toolbar. Frankly i'm surprised there's a debate here. Any slashdotters going to try and tell me they don't fast-forward past commercials on taped programs? Sights i frequent regularly i make a point of turning it off and clicking on their banners (fark, /. and SA), but when i use my computers at home with NIS ad-blocking, then use a laptop at work without it, it drives me nuts trying to read past all the stupid animated crap. i don't have any intention to try and shock the monkey to win the prize, so why bother having to stare at it?
You have the right to manage your website however you wish - if you feel ad views are the best way to generate revenue, you have the right to lock out the people who refuse to view them. If you have content that is unique and valuable, then people will probably accept your constraints and deal with it. If, however, that content is available elsewhere under different conditions, then people will choose to get from the site that generates the fewest or the least onerous restraints - this is likely to spiral downwards towards sites with the fewest constraints.
We are all selfish. You put out content at least in part for your own needs, and desire to be rewarded for it. People want to view your content and pay as little as possible for it. You can put banner ads to pay for it, and block those who refuse to load/view them, but it's not the job of the viewer to view them for your benefit. If you provide something unavailable elsewhere, then you have the upper hand, but most times that's not the case. If you want people to view your content, you have to give them a reason not to go somewhere else - fewer restrictions, better interface, etc. This isn't a common that all own and all are responsible for - this is your website with your material and your money. You can make your own rules, but if those rules don't work, it is not my obligation to support them.
You don't have to make an exception for anyone. It's your playground and you can make the rules. I am not obligated to play there, however, and neither is anyone else. If your rules are disliked, no one will play there, and you will lose. If you want content that pays for itself, you play by the market's rules, not your own, because the desire to have content pay for itself restricts what you can do, and thus by your choice of actions is the superior motive. It is not the market's job to change on your behalf, but your job to change on behalf of the market. If banner ads don't work (people won't view them), then forcing them on people is counterproductive. Maybe subscription or partial subscription (restricted content) will work better, or a donation-based model, or something else not around yet. If you want to make money, someone has to give it to you, and you have to give them a reason to do so. If you don't want to make money, then you are answerable to whatever your motives are in making the site - those will determine what you should do. In any case, as long as others are necessary to what you want to achieve (whether it's making money or converts to a belief, or something else), putting constraints others don't like on your content will not achieve your ends.
"A whole lot. Every business around now knows that they need a web site to stay in business."
Yay! A WWW full of corporate sites trying to tell me why their product is so good an I should go out and buy it. Mix in some stupid contests and games so there's even more incentive.
"Every university has and has had a web site for quite a while. I don't think that they make any money off of them"
I suppose they don't make any money from advertising campaigns either then. The point of a university web site is to provide a service to the students as incentive to choose your university over another. Say you're narrowed your choice down to 2 universities that are pretty comparable. You then find that one of them has a web site that allows you to browse class schedules, pay bills, register online and even take classes while the other has nothing. Which one's going to get your money?
I'm talking about sites like slashdot or skinz.org where their product is their web site content. They only have 4 options that I can think of.
1. Charge people for the content
2. Collect money through advertising
3. Come up with some physical product to sell
4. Find someone that wants to fund you for no other reason than the good you provide
I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure that slashdot couldn't survive on #1 alone. #2 is what everyone hates and wants to block. #3.. come on, how many slashdot shirts, pens and mugs are people really going to buy? As for #4, well that's great if you can find it but not too likely. I know someone that runs a mailing list service and pays for the T1 out of his own pocket with no advertising or anything. It started as a hobby and desire to provide a service for the technical community. I think it's great but there's no way I could justify spending that much money on something like that.
I am not identifying my employer's web site, because it is not fair for me to drag them into this argument. Suffice it to say, it is one of the top 150 sites on the net.
As to the people who claim there is no implied agreement or that I am calling consumers parasites... The consumers who filter ads out, take the content we paid to produce and deliver, and then give us nothing in return but the cost of their use of our site... *they* are the ones who are parasites.
A user who comes to our site, even if they ignore the ads and never click on them, so long as they allow them to be displayed, is fulfilling their part of the bargain and is not a parasite.
As for annoying ads... if we get sufficient complaints from our user base that a particular ad is too obnoxious in its content or manner of delivery, we remove it. Yes, we allow some pop-ups/unders, but we try to make them few and far between. The size and composition of our user base is what we sell to advertisers. If we drive away a significant or specific portion of that user base, we shoot ourselves in the foot, so we are constantly monitoring user response and doing our best to balance the desires of advertisers and users.
Now, having answered that, I am amazed at the hypocrisy of the posters here. Would they ask their favorite magazine or newspaper to be ad free? Few could survive on subscription/purchase price alone. What about alternative weeklies that are free? Those are entirely ad supported.
Yet if those same publications put their content on the Internet, these same people expect it to be ad free. If I was the publisher of one of those papers and I couldn't run ads on my content when I put it on the web, I'd simply not put it on the web.
If you don't like ads, then don't access the content at sites that run them. But don't claim the sites have a responsibility to provide you content ad free or go out of business. In that case, you'll be limited to PBS (which you pay for with taxes) and www.isp.com/~username sites full of pictures of my kitty and my bad poetry.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
1. Charge people for the content
/. could survive on ads alone? Well, if the business model doesn't work, then find something else. Yes, it would be a shame if /. shut down, but if they can't pay the bills, then, well, too bad for us.
The reason that this hasn't worked yet is because no one has figured out how to make it work well.
Do you know what would be great? If I could go to McDonald's and they gave me free food in exchange for watching ads. Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't it be great if
I'm not saying I've got the solution, but like I've said more than once already, that's not my problem.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
Right. There are some sites where I actively go for the ads, Google is one of them, dealmac is another. I edited my ad blocking configuration when I discovered it blocked dealmac ads.
I started blocking ads as a matter of course when they grew to take up half the width of my browser window, and began screwing up the flow of the text and making it appear in a two-words-wide column. That's why I block Slashdot's ads, for example.
Advertising that's tastefully done and properly targeted works. I bought a product I would never have known about if I hadn't seen it advertised in a small ad on a web site, and I wrote to the company to tell them so.
The advertisers reading this thread need to understand something fairly basic: you cannot force people to look at your ads, particularly not on the Internet. An arms race of ad serving vs ad blocking will serve nobody. It didn't do the New York Times any good trying to get around Mozilla's ad blocking, it just helped improve Mozilla and made it more effective at blocking every other site's ads.
The more obnoxious your ads, and the more garish and eye catching they are, the more people you drive to install ad-blocking software, the more sophisticated the ad-blocking software gets, and the worse you make the problem for the ad-supported web sites--including your own. Give up while you're ahead.
As a final comment, I'm amused that when the RIAA's business model is rendered unworkable by technology, everyone says "tough luck, suck it up"--but when slashdot's business model is rendered unworkable by technology, everyone starts saying that we HAVE to look at the ads, THINK of the POOR WEBSITES!
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Nice analogy you have there. Let's try this one:
/. shut down, but if they can't pay the bills, then, well, too bad for us." followed by this one "but like I've said more than once already, that's not my problem."
There used to be a day when you could go to get McDonald's and get free food but you had to look at advertisements on the walls. People got annoyed with the ads so they all started looking only at the floor when they went into McDonald's. Companies stopped advertising with McDonald's when they realized this and McDonald's tried to charge people for food but no one was buying because they liked it when things were free.
What I found funniest about your last post was this statement: "Yes, it would be a shame if
So it would be bad for you if slashdot shut down but that's not your problem?
I personally don't see what's so terribly about banner ads. I'm not talking about pop ups and such, just plain old banner ads.
How did I know "someone" was going to reply ;)
Yes, 200MB makes a big difference to me. If you're willing to spring for my ADSL expenses (modem, connection etc.) then I'd be more than happy to switch.
At least cable is a little faster than ADSL.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
I pay $15 a month to get on the internet, why should I have to pay to watch adverts for crap I don't want
If $15 per month goes to fund production of the works (analogous to the networks' share of your cable bill), then what funds distribution of works to your home (the cable company's share)?
Will I retire or break 10K?
What if the only bank with ATMs located in your town offered only a Flash interface to online banking, claiming that visually impaired users should use the telephone banking interface instead?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Your scenario would last for about 2 days, before someone hacked Mozilla so that it appeared to be IE6.
What if the web site relies on an ActiveX plug-in that does all sorts of lock-in checks analogous to the Windows 3 AARD code? Last time I checked, Mozilla didn't grok ActiveX.
What if the web site relies on Microsoft IE 7 Palladium Edition?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Or every web comic would suddenly have a character named Cisco
Let me see that thong... Better yet, don't.
Yet if everyone co-operated by not blocking banner ads
Unless the entire web moves to interstitials *cough*IGN-orance*cough*, facts of cognitive psychology make cooperation in not blocking banner ads impossible. If boxes shaped like banners hold unwanted content, human beings will block such boxes at the subconscious level.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What do those "You're a winner!", "Punch the monkey!", "You have 1 new emails" ads actually sell, anyway?
Some "You're a winner" ads I've seen sell ad-supported lottery tickets. But, in general, do not click on something that says "Spank the monkey and win 20 Banabux" unless you want to see something really dirty.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I switched to an "All Access Pass" system and Voila!
My problem with subscription web sites is that they often charge a person who wants to read only one article $99.95 for a 365 day subscription. This is why we need a system such as BitPass that allows payments between $0.01 and $0.99 for a single article.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you're coloing your server on residential-priced Internet access, beware of three things: 1. Residential-priced Internet connections typically have more downtime and more unpredictable downtime, 2. the monopoly high-speed Internet access provider (or duopoly providers) may ban servers in the acceptable use policy, and 3. who's going to provide DNS for your dynamic IP address?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm already paying $50 or so per month for broadband.
If I were to host my site on residential broadband, I would have to 1. buy a second computer (using one computer as both workstation and server produces unacceptable reliability) and 2. upgrade to business broadband whose TOS does not forbid servers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A key point I think you are missing is that one of the basic assumptions about the net while it was being engineered was that those who were using it would be responsible for the content, which was mostly engineering data on various nuclear weapon systems. Granted, USENET was parasitic on the net, but in a very constructive way, much the same way as the bacteria in your stomach help you digest food more efficiently than you would be able to absent their assistence.
I think you need to to understand that the net was not engineered to be a billboard with planetary visibility, nor was it created for joe and jane average to surf for cool stuff. You must realize that it was not created to provide employment to web layout artists, html/php/cold fusion programmers, or MBAs with an "e-marketing emphasis".
The net was created by engineers and scientists so that engineers and scientists could share information. The net is about the free exchange of information (free as in free speech) and marketing is about the exact opposite, the control of information to influence your behavior. These two concepts are mutually incompatible.
If you view the net, as I am coming to do, as a cybernetic organism with clusters of cognitive capacity connected by ever more complex pathways, it is reasonable to view commercialism as a cancer or virus in the organism, and ad blocking as a natural response by the organism to an attack.
I use ad blocking software precisely because it has the potential to return the net to its pre-infection state, if enough people use it. The commercial parasites will fail to reproduce themselves in this host, and will have to go back to their old mass media hosts, where the control of information is still possible.
But even in the mass media, that control is slipping. PVRs are making it less and less likely that a given commercial will be seen by a significant portion of the target audience. Turner Network Television has already attacked PVR users along the same lines as your parasite argument, though TNT's chairman characterized PVR users as thieves and not parasites.
I don't wish to belabor the point, but the net is a hostile environment when it comes to commercialization. I have a cube mate who is fond of pointing out that for everything there is a value and a price. It is pretty obvious that a lot of people have decided that the value of "free content" is not worth the price of banner ads.
-Randy
they detect content-type="image/gif" or jpg png etc and what the size is and remove them
It's possible to fool 468x60 detectors by removing a few pixels of space from your CSS template and adding it to the image itself.
Will I retire or break 10K?
ISPs in Australia, New Zealand, and the less developed world typically charge more for bandwidth than ISPs in Europe, the States, and the east coast of Asia because transoceanic communication is so darn expensive. Getting a relevantly new ISP would require emigrating, and last time I checked, it costs the equivalent of five figures EUR or USD to emigrate.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I almost have more computers than I know what to do with. :-) In any case, a light-duty mail/webserver doesn't take much...I started with a 300-MHz K6-2. You can get something that'll work dirt-cheap.
Around here (Las Vegas), at least, the cost difference is minimal...the only thing extra I'm paying beyond what I'd pay for the same level of residential service is $10 per month for a static IP.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I tried to find a place to write to Norton/Symantec, but they aren't making it easy to find. I would like to tell Norton/Symantec that blocking ads will be very damaging to our efforts to offset costs and improve our sites. We will be recommending to our users that they use other anti-virus products like AVG.
One slashdot reader suggested using a cookie to not allow surfers not viewing ads, so I sent the following note to Google.
Hi,
You may have heard that many computers will be running ad blocking software in the near future because Norton anti-virus. I believe google ads should not be subject to this blocking partly because they aren't completely annoying like the pop up/under and so called rich format ads. A slashdot reader suggested using a cookie to determine if the ads are being viewed. Can you impliment something which allows us to redirect a user to a google page saying "This website has chosen to not allow browsers with ad blocking software, please disable it on your computer and then return to (referrer variable).
Thanks,
Chuck
> what funds distribution of works to your home
The cable company's share is the money I give them to distribute the shows to me.
> If $15 per month goes to fund production of the works
That $15 does NOT go to production. The shows are either independently funded or paid for by the network. The network gets reimbursed when they sell a license to air the program to the cable company or major network. They also pay for it with advertising, which is what I don't like. They are getting more & more wealthy by adding another 30 seconds to the commercial slots every few years.
That $15 does NOT go to production.
I knew that. It was part of an (admittedly poorly worded) attempt to explain how the cable companies and Internet companies get away with double-dipping, once for access to the network and once for access to works. If the networks stopped advertising, every channel would be as expensive as the Di$ney Channel. Do you really want to pay a monthly cable TV bill in the high three figures USD?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Oh, I see what you mean about the "double-dipping." I was arguing the wrong point *DOH* :)
> Do you really want to pay a monthly cable TV bill in the high three figures USD?
Nope, I don't want to pay $50/mo for the declining quality that TV is now. Oh well, I guess if I want to watch the 10 or so good shows I have to pay more for less good stuff on more channels. Yay for capitalism. I guess it has less to do with capitalism than with more media being controlled by fewer people... What to do?
i work for a telemarketing company. i'm not a telemarketer, i'm a systems administrator, everyone loves the Do Not Call List, but if my company goes out of business, i'll lose my job.
that's the thing about working for a company that does something that annoys a large number of people (banner ads, spam, telemarketing, etc) as people get fed up with your annoying business practices, they create software, or block lists, or do not call lists to keep you from annoying them. (i'm currently trying to figure out how to convince congress to allow me to sue the Best Buy guys every time they offer me a $99.99 Product Service Plan when i'm buying a $149.99 DVD burner, but that's another article altogether)... My company has changed their focus to include telemarketing, but no depend on it exclusivly... they've begun to diversify!
you either adjust, or you burn out.
companies need to learn to adapt better to changing technologies, and quit whining so much. you're never going to sell anything if you annoy everyone you're trying to convince.
because of the annoyance of the banners and the ads I browse all the sites disabling image and sound loading, disabling javascripts and applets and banners and all kind of stupid ad showing techniques. I sometimes browse with "lynx" instead I'll definetly check nav 2004