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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."
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
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
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?
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
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'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.
The free market is a very successful system. However, it is imperfect: it assumes that everyone acting selfishly will accomplish the common good, which sets up prisoner's dilemma problems.
In this case, nobody likes banner ads, and everyone selfishly wants to block them. If everyone did this, content on the web would be diminished, because fewer people could afford to produce web content full-time, and more content would go to subscriber-pay sites. (Or worse, the advertising will become more embedded and harder to filter out, even visually. For example, this sentence is brought to you by the good people at State Farm. Or every web comic would suddenly have a character named Cisco.) Yet if everyone co-operated by not blocking banner ads, free web content is made available to everyone.
And don't give me a lot of crap about "someone will figure out a better business model", unless you can actually point to a particular website with that model, that is succeeding.
All I'm saying is, think about the unintended consequences before you act selfishly, or praise others for doing so.
Which leads me to another point: there's an appalling lack of ethical behavior on the internet. Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so.
[end rant]
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
None of these methods are perfect, but they can help avoid your banner ads and other web site features from being blocked.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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
No, I shouldn't. Thats like saying just because I go into Best Buy and do some window shopping, I'm required to give them money. Once again- it is not my job to enforce your buisness model. You are free, if you wish, to find a technical way to block those who do not view your ads. THat would be enforcing your buisness model. I don't think it would work, I think the vast majority of people would just find the service/information you supply elsewhere. But you're free to try.
This is just like the Do Not Call list, or the "skipping commercials is theft" idiocy. We, the consumers, have the right to take steps with our own property (telephones, computers, bandwidth we pay for) to stop practices that annoy us. You do not have the right to stop us from doing so. You have the right to deny us your content if we do so, but you do not have the right to force your buisness model down our throats.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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
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.
Those of us who dislike ads (probably 98% of the planet) will do our best not to see them.
First, I highly doubt the number is that high. If asked I'm sure most people would rather watch their favorite TV show with annoying commercials than have that TV show go off the air. Second, you make the choice not to visit the site if you think that their ads are too intrusive. However, if you block ads (other than potentially harmful ads like ActiveX or popups) then you are essentially stealing from the site. The site is, in good faith, giving you content for the price of viewing an ad. If people didn't click ads, then ads wouldn't exist. I do business with a website that makes a lot of money on ads, and their click-thru rates prove that people view ads. They spend a lot of money to provide people with content, assuming people accept the download of their advertisement. Again, why do you need to block ads? Why not just go to another site? Free loading is not the answer to a successful web.
Personally, I wish banners didn't exist either. But I'm also a realist. I would never pay for slashdot, but I use it all the time. I use their bandwidth and CPU cycles on a daily basis. Their ads have gotten bigger over the last two years, and while I don't like it, I appreciate the reasons why they had to do it. If so many people blocked ads that slashdot was a forced subscription site, I would stop visiting. Heck, if that was bound to happen I'd work on some OSS project to thwart ad blockers. I don't want you freeloaders taking away my "free" content!
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
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.