Slashdot Mirror
Norton Antivirus 2004 Ad Blocking - Tough Call?
"Now of course this is a sensitive case as, like most sites around, we get most of our revenues from the banners we sell to advertisers. In fact, we get over 50% of our revenues from these banners and many other big sites, like Google, have an even bigger share of their revenues from the banners. Google's AdWords are not spared and, in fact, with ad blocking enabled, I can't even access our AdWords account as the link to access it is 'Advertise with us' on the main page, probably blocked because of the word 'advertise'.
Now, of course nobody likes banners, but for many sites it is a large part of or the only means of revenue and so there is a fragile balance that is at stake. I hate banners, but without them my company has much less revenues, both from less cashflow from advertisers as well as clients, as we depend a lot on Google's AdWords capacity to bring us clients who are specifically searching for what we sell.
Norton Antivirus 2004 now comes bundled with a lot of new PCs, and I saw the problem on many of our clients with new PCs as well as some of our sales representatives, who have a hard time selling a product our potential clients do not see advertised anywhere.
So I'm asking to all you webmasters around what's at stake here and the potential repercussions. I know that for us it will be disastrous if NAV 2004 gains too much popularity and its ad blocking software is used by millions of people. It would mean our corporate clients would not see our banners or ads, our consumer clients would not find us and would not see the banners of our corporate clients, who would then not pay us because they'd be paying for something too many people can't see. We already have some of our clients threatening us to cancel their contracts with us if we don't fix this.
This also brings, in my opinion, the subject of spam and general Internet advertising. While banners are not spam, they're almost as hated, especially those that pop right in our screens and move around with flashy graphics. But where does the limit stand between what we can do with the net and the user experience that we'd all like to have? Of course the Internet still has a lot of grounds to make, still being a mere teen, especially in the capacity of consumers spending money to buy something on a product they already spent a lot of money. Banners are the downside of having a lot of content for free as we pay for it by being annoyed by people who want to sell us stuff instead.
But what could be done instead if users are sufficiently annoyed by banners to request such a tool, as was probably the case considering that ad blocking is automatically enabled in NAV 2004? Web sites need revenues and the consumers are not ready to pay for it, largely because of the natural impoverishment imposed by increasing technologies. Buying a computer now means paying for the hardware, the software, the Internet connection, the gizmos, the subscriptions to sites and of course the upgrades, all of which were not expenses 20 years ago."
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).
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?
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.)
I wonder why we as consumers have some kind of "responsiblity" for accepting the advertising that marketers foist upon us. I, for one (And I'm sure there are many here) remember the Internet before it was commercial, and before there were shysters trying to convince me that advertising is what creates the medium. That's just not true. Advertising is a parasite that sits on top of a succesfull communications medium, not a creator of such mediums. I would argue that marketing and advertising are naturally agnostic to the creation of new communications mediums ... deriding them as being "not up to snuff" until individuals make those mediums successfull .... which then tempts the advertising community to engage and use those mediums ... several years down the road attempting to state that it is advertising itself that makes those means of communications succesfull. When will it all end!
The internet may be in its teens, but banner ads are younger still. Content on the net was free before the ads, it will be free after the ads. There may not be as much free content, but I sincerely doubt that the real quality stuff will disappear.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
You run a website, it's your job to figure out the
funding. Those of us who dislike ads (probably 98% of the planet) will do our best not to see them,
and the more technically inclined among us WILL block your ad, and the business-savvy subset of
those will sell that setup, in some form, to the rest. If websites can't live without it, tough.
If they find another way to get funds, wonderful, but your funding is, to me, a black box that we shouldn't need to think about. I'm perfectly happy spending some time fiddling with Internet Junkbuster or Privoxy to cut out web ads, and tweaking my mail filters to remove advertisements from yahoo mailing lists if I get good results.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
By installing the ad blocking software. He doesn't want ads. Your buisness depends on them? Tough. It isn't his job to make your buisness model work. We hate it when the MPAA and RIAA try and force their buisness model on people, but slashdot editors think its somehow better when its on the internet? I don't think so.
You want to make money on the web? Sell something the people want. Give them a reason to pay. Extra content, early access, better content. Sell t-shirts. But don't expect the consumer to support your buisness model when it fails. And advertising on the web has failed- its ineffective, it generates no revenue for the advertisers, and its just fucking annoying.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Maybe I'm just not seeing it, but I'm running NAV 2004 and not only do I not have banner blocking, but there is certainly nothing in the options to enable or disable it, nor is there any mention of it in the options anywhere that I can find.
Makes me curious if there was another version of the program featuring banner-blocking after I purchased mine -- which would of course be typical.
If you read the article, you'd know that the 2004 version comes with ad blocking enabled by DEFAULT. This certainly does poes a problem to sites that rely on banners for income, since most consumers will never mess around with the settings for their software.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
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.
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?
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
This may or may not be true. It depends a great deal on how the capability is implemented. Does the installation clearly indicate the nature of the capability and ask you if you want it enabled? How difficult is it to turn it off? If you purchase a computer with it preinstalled, how difficult is it to know that the capability is turned on?
I con't particularly care for banner ads but if I installed an anti-virus program and it started modifying my browsing capabilities without my consent, I'd be quite irrate.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
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.
If banner ads fail, more and more sites will be forced into a pay model, and the days of the "Free Internet" will be almost over.
The author must be new to the internet. If you go back to the good old days, for example when Yahoo used to be at yahoo.stanford.edu, there were no banner ads. Guess what, the internet was free then.
To claim that the loss of banner ads will automatically lead to the loss of a non-free internet is to ignore history and to show a lack of imagination. Banner ads are only a 1994 invention, they aren't an intrinsic part of either the internet or the world wide web.
"Interstitial" Web ads are ones you see when you click from the main page of a site to an article page and, instead, you see a whole-page ad you must click past to get to the page you wanted to see.
This is one of many online ad styles you're likely to see becoming more popular if enough people start using ad blocking software to make a noticeable difference in commercial site ad revenues.
Yahoo Hong Kong is already selling them: See what they look like here.
- Robin
Privoxy (formerly known as JunkBuster) has been doing this very successfully for years now.
And it does it to the scale of your entire network (since you integrate it with your proxy server) and with any browser you can possibly think of.
I'm a computer programmer. I can assure you, the average computer user is a total blockhead.
A few good assumptions to make when designing software:
1) Set the defaults to something useful. 90% of users will never change them, and 75% don't even know what a "preferences" dialog is.
2) Make clicking "Yes" the safe option. Users frequently don't read dialog boxes.
3) Don't give users any decision more complicated than a three-way choice, and if possible, make it a binary (on-off) choice. Anything more complicated just increases tech support calls.
Guess what? Most people won't even realize that the ad blocking is on, and even fewer will realize they can turn it off.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
But when a banner abuses it's animation capabilities or tries to become a popup, I draw the line. If a banner isn't animated, there's a chance I might even click on it.
The free market is a very successful system. However, it is imperfect: it assumes that everyone acting selfishly will accomplish the common good, which sets up prisoner's dilemma problems.
In this case, nobody likes banner ads, and everyone selfishly wants to block them. If everyone did this, content on the web would be diminished, because fewer people could afford to produce web content full-time, and more content would go to subscriber-pay sites. (Or worse, the advertising will become more embedded and harder to filter out, even visually. For example, this sentence is brought to you by the good people at State Farm. Or every web comic would suddenly have a character named Cisco.) Yet if everyone co-operated by not blocking banner ads, free web content is made available to everyone.
And don't give me a lot of crap about "someone will figure out a better business model", unless you can actually point to a particular website with that model, that is succeeding.
All I'm saying is, think about the unintended consequences before you act selfishly, or praise others for doing so.
Which leads me to another point: there's an appalling lack of ethical behavior on the internet. Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so.
[end rant]
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
You're so right. I hate all these scummy programs that mangle a site's content. Like that evil program Mozilla, taking someone's beautiful, solid stream of HTML codes and unlawfully maniuplating it into tables, replacing img tags with images, changing colors, etc. It's criminal. Somebody sue under the DMCA or something, it's completely destroying what the purpose of the internet is!
OK, back to reality. These programs aren't manipulating the content on an internet site. Their hosted data is staying the same. How you chose to render that published data is up to you. It might include text-based browsing, graphically enabled browsing, just displaying key areas (maybe from a search result), or, yes, removing ads.
None of these methods are perfect, but they can help avoid your banner ads and other web site features from being blocked.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
...the only sure way to do it is to make people pay if they want to access your content.
Plain and simple. Advertising has always been and will forever be a inherently unstable way to earn money. If you want to be sure you'll make money, you have to actually charge for something.
ObStupidQuestion: So you think slashdot should just go pay only then? Depends on what the people running slashdot want to do. It's big enough on it's own, and part of a big enough family of properties, and the staff seems to be on the small end, so they can probably make do with ad-based stuff. And if this kind of ad blocking technology gets popular enough, the clever people that created the site are more than clever enough to get around ad blockers. And frankly, the quality index oof comments would jump through the roof if it was made pay only. Would I pay? Nope. I come here because it's free, and if it suddenly wasn't, I doubt my life would be any poorer for not surfing this place a few times a day.
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.
Boo fucking hoo. If people weren't bombarded with thirty ads for shit they don't care about on every site they go to, this software wouldn't be neccesary. I thought that it was figured out a long time ago that relying on ads was a stupid way to generate revenue.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
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
Amen.
What companies are failing to realize is that you have NO RIGHTS on the Internet. If users want to block banner ads, there isn't a thing you can do about it.
How about persuing a REAL business model instead?
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
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.
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!
What companies are failing to realize is that you have NO RIGHTS on the Internet. If users want to block banner ads, there isn't a thing you can do about it.
What users are failing to realize is that you have NO RIGHTS on the Internet. If companies want to block all user agents from their sites except for MSIE 6.x on Windows XP, there isn't a thing you can do about it.
When the shoe is on the other foot, does it still fit?
Then they can turn it off.
Lets face facts- advertisements are annoying. Thats why 60 million Americans signed up for the do not call list. Thats why so many people ALREADY block popups and images. Hell, its one of the reasons mozilla became popular- it blocked ads. SO, given all this- do you really think the very many people will be upset that it blocks ads? No- they're going to be estatic. Come on- do you really think that if you went to a guy on the street and asked if he wanted the ads back he'd say yes?
So the webmasters will have the same problem the RIAA and the MPAA have had. They deserve the same answer- fix your buisness model. Just like the **AA, they'll probably start by trying to block access to those who use it. But don't expect that to work too well, just like DRM isn't working for the **AA. Webmasters will adapt, or die out.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
If I were a Bastard Web Designer, I would respond to this trend by building my sites in Flash, with HTML used only as a bare-bones wrapper for delivering the Flash files.
Content and advertising would be so deeply integrated that it would be IMPOSSIBLE to view one without the other (or at least much much more difficult).
Take that, Slashjerks! And remember, to the average user, the bells and whistles of Flash are a GOOD thing, not a bad thing.
Advertising doesn't create the medium, nor the content, but it darn well supports them.
I work for a web site that derives the bulk of its revenue from advertising? That salary goes to pay the salaries of about 30 employees and for the bandwidth from about 3 billion pageviews a year.The advertisers pay the couple of million dollars a year it costs to run our site.
If you remove the advertising, you remove our site from the internet, because we're darn well not about to work full time for free, plus tap our wallets to pay for the bandwidth you're using.
There is an implicit agreement between publishers and readers. We'll provide you content you deem valuable, and in return for that value, you'll view ads. You can gloss over them, don't even have to pay attention to them, but they have to pass in front of your eyeballs along with our content.
If you pay for your net access and just want to e-mail with friends, chat on IRC, post messages on newsgroups, and access personal web sites, you should never ever have to see an ad. You're paying your ISP for the bandwidth and no one else is having to pay for the content you're enjoying.
But if you want a free mail account with Hotmail or Yahoo, want to read content on professionally produced web sites, watch streaming video, etc., you must either be willing to pay subscription fees or suffer through some banners. For many sites, a subscription model doesn't work for any number of reasons.
If you use blockers to remove banners from content it is costing someone else money to produce and deliver to you, it is not the advertising that is a parasite. You are the parasite.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Do you think banner ads are still an effective way to offset the cost of a website, or has their time passed? If so, what do we replace them with?
I would recommend replacing them with 1x1 transparent GIFs.
Seriously though, with squid, a redirector, and about 200 rules, I very rarely see banner ads and it keeps my bandwidth costs down.
Sorry, but if I have to choose between a month of "supportive" web surfing and an extra 200MB of download/surfing/whatever, then it's not too hard to see which one I'd pick.
Here is a list of the number of URL rewrites that have occurred since I installed this system:
Feb 15302
Mar 16581
Apr 19221
Jun 20333
Jul 19294
Aug 10320
Sep 15912
Oct 13705
Now, every single one of those rewrites has spared me at the very minimum an HTTP request and a few hundred bytes. This applies only to non-banner objects (such as counters, which I also block). Ads are usually at least 3k with some extending far beyond that.
I should probably remind those that need reminding, that I have a monthly download quota of 3000MB. The bandwidth savings are too significant for me to ignore.
Flame away...
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
Site owners have countermeasures:
1. convert more content into images and host them offsite -- the site becomes unusable if external images are hidden
2. host ad images and scripts locally so they don't look like ad content
3. use a registration and login processes that do not work when ad-blockers are enabled
4. obscure ad-keywords or convert them to local images
5. use scripts to compute external ad-related link addresses
6. charge for all content
7. go out of business
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Running banner ads is a stupid way to go these days. PEOPLE ARE SICK OF THEM. I will only run Google's ads on my websites as banner ads are obtrusive and obnoxious. Any site that uses them... Well, you're gonna go the way of the steam engine. People are sick of it.
People know ad revenue is needed to run sites, but a lot of them I know won't tolerate annoying banner ads (or worse still, Flash ads) anymore and have asked me to hook them up with ad blocking software, which I gladly do.
The article does indeed say that, but the article is just plain wrong. Not only is it not enabled by default, it is not even present. That feature is part of Norton Personal Firewall 2004, not Anti-Virus. I havn't tried that software, but from the description of its features, it doesn't sound like it is on by default.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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.
What users are failing to realize is that you have NO RIGHTS on the Internet. If companies want to block all user agents from their sites except for MSIE 6.x on Windows XP, there isn't a thing you can do about it.
When the shoe is on the other foot, does it still fit?
Wanna bet?
Your scenario would last for about 2 days, before someone hacked Mozilla so that it appeared to be IE6.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
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?
Here, here. I wouldn't bother to block ads if it weren't for the inane stupid tricks advertisers try to use. The onslaught of Flash ads was the final straw. I now use Privoxy at work and home.
I like Google's take on advertising - and Privoxy leaves these alone. Its a shame that Symantec's product doesn't.
Leave the censoring and content-filtering out of a basic security product
Ads aren't content. Ads are anti-content. Ad-blocking software isn't censorship, its a feature for increasing the signal to noise ratio.
To anyone who isn't trying to sell me something I don't want, this is extremely obvious.
I see your point, but I think there is a difference here. In my opinion popups are a blatent hi-jacking of a computer system, by abusing a browser function that should not be there in the first place. Banner ads are part of the composition of the page you are viewing, and the author of the page should have the right to put them there.
That said, I feel I should have the right to interpret the HTML generated any way I choose. I should be able to view any, some, or all images, as I'm the one who has to download them.
It might be worth pointing out that not only does Google do all this right - but they have always plainly labled their ads. Some site's ideas of text ads were to mix it in to the search content. I believe everyone is pretty straight forward now - but it took legal threats to get some on board. Google was there from day one.
Technically, a ratio of 0:0 isn't balanced -- it's undefined, since you're dividing by zero.