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?"

Comments

Feh

[Tyrdium]

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...

Re:Feh

[Tyrdium]

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.

Re:Feh

[zapp]

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.

Re:Not just pop-ups

[loucura!]

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.

Re:Not just pop-ups

[gwernol]

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.

Re:Not just pop-ups

[pbox]

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!

Re:Not just pop-ups

[$calar]

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

Re:Not just pop-ups

[tklancer]

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.

Re:Not just pop-ups

[markfive]

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.