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Pop-Up Ads Lead to Consumer Revolt, Ad-Blocking
securitas writes "The New York Times' Saul Hansell reports on pop-up advertising and the consumer backlash against intrusive advertising. It's worth noting that pop-ups and pop-unders are the most effective, lucrative and annoying online advertising form. The article discusses the boom in ad-blocker software, with AOL, Yahoo and Google getting into the game. Microsoft says that it will include pop-up blocking in IE when it releases WinXP SP2. According to one pop-under ad agency, 20%-25% percent of Web users have pop-up blocking enabled, double the rate of a year ago - Earthlink's numbers bear that out, with 1 million of its 5 million customers using its ad-blocking software 18 months after release. DoubleClick says that it is 'developing technology that will enable pop-up ads to evade the blocking software.' Why isn't that surprising?"
For that I use the Flash Click-to-Play module for Mozilla/Firebird.
Replaces flash with a box of same size with words "click to play".
Occasionally I tweak the entry it creates in userContent.css to have an opacity of 0.1 too.
Makes it even less obtrusive.
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
Bye bye Doubleclick ads...
That's easy, download Ted Mielczarek's Flash Click To View Plugin, it displays a button instead of the flash animation. If you click the button you see the flash animation.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
I use Mozilla Firebird and the excellent Flash click to view extension, which only downloads and plays flash content once you've clicked on a message replacing the original content.
No more of those ugly beasts for me, and I still get to see all legit flash sites.
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
Now if there were only a way to block certain Flash advertisements...
Agreed, and at the risk of Slashdotting a good guy's website, I'd highly recommend this flash blocker. I installed it a couple of weeks ago and now I don't have any more Flash ads. Its improved my web surfing immeasurably. The trouble with Flash ads is they (usually) have so much animation in them that they draw the attention from the text of the article I'm trying to read. Some sites are now so Flash-ad heavy they're unusuable. Flash Click-to-View is a wonderful tool that lets you view only the Flash content you want to see. Let's hope they incorporate it into the main Mozilla build soon.
Sailing over the event horizon
The hosts file on http://remember.mine.nu is the best example to begin blocking all those annoying advertisement and popup services.
:)
Besides using browsers which allow popup blocking (like Mozilla) this is one of the best methods to ignore them all.
Install this good example of useful data and be happy
...but firewalls and AV software as well.
My hard drive blew up last week, and when rebuilding my system, I skipped ZoneAlarm and installed Kerio Personal Firewall instead... an incredible piece of software if I do say so myself, but it also has built in ad blocking (and configurable to add more blocking).
Not that that matters too much since I am using FireBird, but a two pronged approach is better than one.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/technology/19eco m.html?ex=1389934800&en=5b1cf221151d8850&ei=5007&p artner=GOOGLE">its gonna get much worse
Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will run full-motion video commercials from Pepsi, AT&T, Honda, Vonage and Warner Brothers, in a six-week test that some analysts and online executives say could herald the start of a new era of Internet advertising.
The new ad technology, from Unicast, an advertising company based in New York, invisibly loads the commercial while unwitting users read a Web page, then displays the ad across the entire browser area when users click to a new page. The resulting ad is identical to TV, whether the user has a high- or low-speed connection. The company says the technology evades pop-up blockers, but the person can skip the ad by clicking a box.
thanks, no need to remind me to add your servers to the Hostfile Project
Yea... those older ones really lag under all of those ads. Use google toolbar and spybot and thats been effective in killing just about all of those annoying ads. (no popups at least)
http://www.alanofdale.net/download/hosts.zip
it blocks over 62,000 different ad servers. So all I get is a blank space where an ad is suppost to be.
Enjoy!
Can Smeg!!! Will Smeg!!!
Google's Toolbar v2 stopped the pop-up/unders for me on IE6 while Mozilla/Firebird and Konqueror have stopped them for me without add-ons.
But I have not found a solution for Flash-overs, that is, flash monstrosities that overwhelm the content of a page.
It's so incredibily annoying I'm beginning to understand why we need to repeal the ban on automatic weapons in the workplace.
Anyway, how about a "disable Flash" button? Or just a STOP THE MOVEMENT button to make a freakin' page readible without needing Dramamine. If newspaper ads twirled, flipped, burped and gyrated I'd meet the paperboy with a full metal jacket each morning until it stopped.
.
.
.
.
Medication? Yes I took it this morning, why do you ask?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
DoubleClick says that it is 'developing technology that will enable pop-up ads to evade the blocking software.'
And on a completely unrelated note, DoubleClick's stock price dropped today, an astounding 53%.
It's sad, because they just don't get it (tm).
It also allows wildcarding, so instead of having to block every single fastclick server, you can just have "*fastclick*" in your preferences and you get 0 ads from fastclick (the one who serves the "1000 free smiley" ads).
So depending upon whether the sites u visit use which tags, the plug-in may or maynot work.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Better yet, you can use adblock extension for Mozilla SeaMonkey/FireBird. The latest development branch already can block page elements BEFORE they load. alk about speeding up surfing, when you don't have to wait on doubleclik, googlesyndication, clickserve, hitbox, trafficmp, etc...
It also can block flash, iframe and java, javascript as well...
see mozdev for install.
DISCLAIMER: MS IE (l)users need not apply!
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
Click on [start], then click on [run]. Type in the following in the run dialog box:
notepad c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Edit to your hearts content - then click on file, then save.
To close off notepad, click on the "X" in the upper right hand corner of the notepad window.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
What's much worse is the Annoyware/Spyware software that is infecting millions of computers. In the school district I am responsible for, dozens of computers are filled with things like SaveNow, GAIN, n-Case, and many other programs that serve little purpose other than to annoy. Some of them are even extortionate; a program spawned itself and informed the user "Would you like to remove popups?" and prompted them to BUY some rediculous software....when their software was causing them in the first place. Programs like Spybot S&D and AdAware are hard-pressed to keep up with this stuff...and some of it, like RapidBlast, for instance, are almost polymorphic in the ways their authors continually change their methods of "infection." One particular method was to spawn two processes of the same thing, and order the second process to respawn the first if it was somehow terminated. Sneaky criminals, is what they are.
use devel branch adblock extension.
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
A previous slashdot article yielded this gem that I use to block some ads. Thanks to the original poster (several months, maybe a year ago !). Set this as your default stylesheet and you are ready to go.
,d mt.com'],r eak.com'],v ertis'],n ner/'] { /* this hides the usual 468x60 Flash banner ads */i dth= "468"][height="60"] { /* this hides the not so usual but very annoying 728x90 Flash banner ads */i dth= "728"][height="90"] {
*[src*='/ad/']
*[src*='/ads/'],
*[src*='/Ads/'],
*[src*='at
*[src*='doubleclick'],
*[src*='bluest
*[src*='us.a1.yimg.com'],
*[src*='ad
img[src^='http://images.slashdot.org/ba
display: none !important;
}
embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"][w
display: none !important;
visibility: hidden !important;
}
embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"][w
display: none !important;
visibility: hidden !important;
}
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
The reason is testing issues not anything to do with third party SW per se.
One benefit is that I had to reinstall Flash. I didn't get around to doing it for a few days and I realized I could live happily without it.
Try it you might like it.
Help fight continental drift.
I already do this. There's two components:
- A blackhole Web server. It runs on a single IP on my LAN and returns a 404 code for any request.
- A wildcard zone file for BIND that returns an A record pointing to the blackhole Web server's address for any name in whatever domain uses the file.
When I want to block a domain, I just add an entry toYes, this can be bypassed by hard-coding IP addresses in, but if that starts becoming common I'll respond by adding firewall rules that return appropriate ICMP errors for the netblocks involved.
And the neat thing is that, while it takes a techie to set something like this up the first time, copying that setup onto a new LAN is utterly trivial.
AdBlock rules! Here's my adblock filter. Look at it, poke at it, make it better, please!
n g.com*k ag.net/* a lueclick.com/*a nners/*
* /adsserver/*/ *u inst.com/*d server*.*.com/*. zdnet.com/chkpt/gs_pre_sawflash/www.gamespo t.com/promos/*. 1d/Ads/*t p://g.fool.com/art/free/ibd/*g lesyndication.com/* m g.com/us.yimg.com/a/*b ox?*g if*t heinq uirer.pl
Maybe we can condense this down to a reg expr.
[Adblock]
*.ad-flow.com/*
*.ad.*
*.advertisi
*.banner.*.*/*
*.bluestreak.com/*
*.fal
*.fastclick.net/*
*.instacontent.net/*
*.qksrv.net/*
*.ru4.com/*
*.spinbox.net/*
*.v
*/*.advertising.com/*
*/CurrentB
*/ad/*
*/ads.*
*/ads/*
*/adserver/*
*/advert*
*/banner.*.*/*
*/banner
*/bannerads/*
*/banners/*
*/marketing/*
*/q
*://*.*/*468x60.jpg
*_banner.gif
*a
*atdmt.com*
*banner.swf
*chkpt
*doubleclick.*
*i.i.com.com/cnwk
*mediaplex.com*
*tribalfusion.com*
ht
http://pagead2.goo
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?*
http://stats.cashring.com/ads?*
http://us.a1.yi
http://us.imdb.com/google/
http://www.distrowatch.com/images/kokoku/*.
http://www.resellerratings.com/price-direct-
Security Tab Restricted Sites Icon Sites... "doubleclick.com" enter "doubleclick.net" enter OK Internet Icon Custom Level... Disable all Jscript and ActiveX controls OK Let's see doubleclick beat that.
Calling atheism and agnosticism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.
But for those of you that don't, or have applets popping up elsewhere (like AIM), I'm working on a java ad blocker that allows you to block specific classes from loading. So, if the JRE gets a request to load a class you don't want to load, it can be replaced with a null, or a junk applet, or any other class you like.
I'll put up my blocker (requires JDK 1.4 and the ability to set flags for your JDK -- anyone using the Windows Java Plugin should be fine) at http://tklancer.net/javablocker in the next few days. It's fairly basic right now -- just a class file, some preference files, and that's it. The process is pretty simple, though -- load a page, note that sucky annoying ad applet loaded, go through the log file I write to disk, and add the class name to the block file. Restart your JRE, and it should be blocked.
The rest of my filters are just various adservers like doubleclick, etc.
It should be noted that it is a good idea to consolidate these filter lists in AdBlock as much as possible due to the way the algorithm works. The longer your list, the slower the page will load.
I even use Proxomitron to change the hideous mustard-yellow on this very page to a much less offensive grey.
Honest to god...it gives me a headache otherwise.
Download the google toolbar for IE.
meh
FWIW: Opera allows enabling/disabling plugins by hitting F12, click enable/disable in Opera. Very useful for preventing Flash until you want/are required to view it. Same for popups although I have yet to encounter a situation when popups needed to be enabled.
For example, I recall once saying that I thought a feature of one of our ads was obnoxious and would certainly cost us sales. So, my boss said "let's test it", and we went over to the graphics department, I described the changes I wanted, an artist made them in a few minutes in Photoshop, and my boss purchased 25k impressions of the new banner. A couple hours later, we had complete stats on how this banner had done compared to other banners we'd run in the same time on the same sites, and knew by exacly how much my banner was worse than the others.
We constantly tweak our banners, measuring the results. It's very Darwinian.
What this means is that online advertising isn't like, say, TV ads, where if people skip the ads with Tivo, no one is really going to notice, because there is a lot of fuzziness between showing ads TV ads and getting more sales. If people use banner blockers, we'll notice right away, and be able to tell exactly how it is effecting our ads, and that will be reflected very quickly in what we are willing to pay to show banners, which will in turn very quickly be reflected in what the ad companies will pay websites for banner space.
There are a lot of useful sites that will simply go away if too many people start blocking ads.
Kills 90% of the stores out there. Then remove the terms once you're looking to buy again.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
...popup ads [...] seems penny-wise and pound-foolish, sacrificing long-term customer satisfaction [...] for a potential short-term boost in sales
Some pop businesses will buy a big load of product and act as "resellers". Once the product sold out, all the customers (pop viewers with spyware installed) saw the popup 100 times, any potential buyers where found. They start over with another product.
I know the spyware from Total Velocity does this (and a lot more).
The actual creator/distributor is "Santa Monica Networks" (smni.com).
They start by analyzing the most popular searches and web sites for the last few weeks or months, from the data accumulated through the spyware.
Then they find a related product, and make a "test run" of very few popups (~1000), not enough to create a wave of complaint. If sales are good they buy a big quantity for a good price. (Good is a 2% click on pops and 2% sale on clicks for clients recently searching or surfing for a similar product).
The Spyware, an autonomous EXE, opens a seperate IE process, so no embeded add-on pop-up blocker works!
Here is part of the term of use(from Kephyr spyware library) site:
"By using the Software, you may be exposed to contaminated files, computer viruses, eavesdropping, harassment, electronic trespassing, hacking and other harmful acts or consequences that might lead to unauthorized invasion of privacy, loss of data and other damages."
To add insult to injury, most of the soft. dev. done offshore in Estonia (www.smn.ee) and Lithuania (www.smn.lt), are involved (?) in several "network" and "network security" groups and consulting partnership (like at CISCO).
If you need to research them for your MBA or something, the business is:
Santa Monica Network Inc (SMNI.COM)
227 Broadway st. S.304
Santa Monica 90401
Lead Engineer:
Alex Karelin (original creator of the spyware)
alex@smni.com
Junkbuster went unmaintained years ago. But other took up the code and renamed it Privoxy. It supports http 1.1 as well as many other features that junkbuster didn't have.
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
You can thank the webmasters that won't serve pages unless the server thinks the user has accepted the pop-ups. Expect more of the same. If you have a real need to use popups, add a note to your content saying so. I myself would try to find a way to do what needs to be done without them, as this practice will only become more prevalent.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
I work for a company that makes e-learning software. Our customers' biggest headache is popup blockers, because the specifications for standardized e-learning (such as SCORM) require that learning content pop up in a new window, separate from the student's list of e-courses.
There are, at last count, 103 different software programs, browsers, toolbars, and security applications that block popups. Many users don't even realize that they've got them turned on--McAfee or the Google toolbar just "did it for them." So we get calls when users can't run the certification courses they've paid hundreds of dollars for. And the cost of supporting 103 different popup block strategies is horrendous.
Popup windows had a legitimate use, that's why they were invented. Popup spammers and scammers destroyed that usefulness, and the popup blockers are causing some serious "collateral damage."
This stinks. I don't know the solution.