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Pop-Up Ads Lead to Consumer Revolt, Ad-Blocking

Posted by simoniker on from the in-yer-face dept.

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?"

14 of 697 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not just pop-ups by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Feh by Tyrdium · · Score: 5, Informative
    Doubleclick is developing a way to get past a popup blocker. Too bad for them there's something called a hosts file...

    127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net

    Bye bye Doubleclick ads...

    1. Re:Feh by Tyrdium · · Score: 5, Informative

      Oh, forgot to mention. Take a look at Dan Pollock's hosts file if you want a great premade hosts file that blocks tons of ads and other nasties.

    2. Re:Feh by zapp · · Score: 5, Informative

      A word of caution on using premade hosts files...

      On several windows 2000 boxes I ran into periodic CPU spikes to 100% by SERVICES.EXE (about once every 15 minutes).

      Eventually I realized that I had allowed Spy-Bot Search & Destroy to install its hosts entries to block popups and other sites.

      It seems windows was reprocessing that file (it was quite huge) every few minutes, and was having a hard time with it.

      Not saying this will happen to everyone, but when i deleted that file and hand made a smaller one, the slowdowns went away.

      --
      no comment
  3. Re:Not just pop-ups by loucura! · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  4. Re:Not just pop-ups by Gruturo · · Score: 4, Informative
    Now if there were only a way to block certain Flash advertisements and still be able to watch Strong Bad answering his e-mail.

    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.
  5. Re:Not just pop-ups by gwernol · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  6. Not just browsers... by T-Kir · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...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!
  7. Its getting worse, Television AD's come to the web by sh0rtie · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  8. Re:Not just pop-ups by CaptBubba · · Score: 4, Informative
    Adblockis a much more powerful tool than Mozilla's built-in "block images" feature. It lets you see a list of all blockable elements on a page, with those already blocked highlighted. It can also block flash (has a little tab on the flash animation). It used to not block flash, but now I don't bother to install the "flsh click to view" plugin because I don't need it. This and mouse gestures are all I need.

    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).

  9. Re:Not just pop-ups by pbox · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  10. Re:Not just pop-ups by $calar · · Score: 5, Informative

    AdBlock rules! Here's my adblock filter. Look at it, poke at it, make it better, please!

    Maybe we can condense this down to a reg expr.

    [Adblock]
    *.ad-flow.com/*
    *.ad.*
    *.advertisin g.com*
    *.banner.*.*/*
    *.bluestreak.com/*
    *.falk ag.net/*
    *.fastclick.net/*
    *.instacontent.net/*
    *.qksrv.net/*
    *.ru4.com/*
    *.spinbox.net/*
    *.va lueclick.com/*
    */*.advertising.com/*
    */CurrentBa nners/*
    */ad/*
    */ads.*
    */ads/*
    */adserver/*
    * /adsserver/*
    */advert*
    */banner.*.*/*
    */banner/ *
    */bannerads/*
    */banners/*
    */marketing/*
    */qu inst.com/*
    *://*.*/*468x60.jpg
    *_banner.gif
    *ad server*.*.com/*
    *atdmt.com*
    *banner.swf
    *chkpt. zdnet.com/chkpt/gs_pre_sawflash/www.gamespo t.com/promos/*
    *doubleclick.*
    *i.i.com.com/cnwk. 1d/Ads/*
    *mediaplex.com*
    *tribalfusion.com*
    htt p://g.fool.com/art/free/ibd/*
    http://pagead2.goog lesyndication.com/*
    http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?*
    http://stats.cashring.com/ads?*
    http://us.a1.yim g.com/us.yimg.com/a/*
    http://us.imdb.com/google/b ox?*
    http://www.distrowatch.com/images/kokoku/*.g if*
    http://www.resellerratings.com/price-direct-t heinq uirer.pl

  11. Re:Not just pop-ups by tklancer · · Score: 5, Informative
    I noted above that AdBlocker for Mozilla now has (in the dev branch) Java blocking. That's uber-cool -- for those of us that use Mozilla. I'll have to check it out, since I didn't know about it.

    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.

  12. Re:Not just pop-ups by markfive · · Score: 5, Informative
    I seem to block about 90 percent of my ads with these regexps. They take care of quite a few of your "ad" and "banner" filters, all in a nice neat little package:
    /[\W\d][Aa]d(server|s|remote)?[\W\d]/
    /[\W\d][Bb] anner(s|id\=)?[\W\d]/
    /[\W\d][Ss]ponsors?[\W\d]/
    /amazon\.com.*\W(promotions|marketing|merchants|s tores|associates)\W/
    /yimg\.com.*\W(a|flash)\W/

    *The weird spaces are due to Slashdot.
    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.