Not Enough Ads? Install Adbar.

An anonymous reader writes "Jesse Ruderman brings the worst feature of Opera, Advertisements, to Firefox with his extension Adbar. According to the page, 'adbar displays Google ads related to pages you view. Because the ads are relevant, they are occasionally useful. When adbar isn't displaying ads from Google, it displays Firefox-related things such as silly Firefox slogans, ads for other Mozilla software, and requests for donations to the Mozilla Foundation.'"

Comments

Yeah, ok.

[Valar]

And when I'm done, I need to start installing my virus collection.

Re:Yeah, ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't copy that floppy!

Re:Yeah, ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

And when I'm done, I need to start installing my virus collection.

This is awesome! I just found out that I can pay money to have my own conversations tapped, and now I just found out that I can install a plugin for my browser that gives me more ads! If they ever come up with a device for my computer that shoves a hot poker in my ass every so often, I'll be in heaven!

IT'S A TRAP!

[Rylfaeth]

or so shouts Admiral Adbar.
-Rylfaeth

Re:IT'S A TRAP!

[adamjaskie]

Time to RTFA I suppose...

Maybe that would be a good idea. From the FAQ:

Who gets money?
adbar uses the "test" adsense mode, so advertisers don't pay Google and Google doesn't pay anyone.

It's obviously a joke. The guy says you can pay him $19 to register to get rid of the ads, followed by uninstalling the extension.

I hate to admit this...

[Osrin]

but I've been using gmail for a number of months now, and I'm finding their targeted advertising more and more helpful.

I guess I've officially lost at the internet.

Sometimes people actually want ads

[MrRTFM]

When I'm buying a car or appliance, I like seeing ads - I go through all the catalogs and magazines looking for them.

Although, I wouldnt it it as a sidebar on all the time, and I cant imagine internet ads being usefully targetted.

Does Google know about this?

[LostCluster]

Google is very strict about where they allow their ads to be shown. For example, Google will not feed ads to sites that express extreme political views, or deal with taboo topics such as internet gambling.

So, I'm wondering if they approved this project. If they haven't, then Google will be pulling the plug very shortly...

Re:Does Google know about this?

[jesser]

Correct, the reason it runs in test mode is that I haven't asked the Adsense folks at Google for permission yet.

is there a version for

[theguywhosaid]

Internet Explorer?

Re:is there a version for

[mabinogi]

hundreds of them, just use IE for a few hours and one is bound to install itself.

Re:is there a version for

[LostCluster]

Actually, there is sorta...

If you're an AdSense publisher that is. All of us who run Google ads can install a tool that gives us access to a preview of what ads Google will run next to a page so that we can decide if we want to put the ad code on the page or not. The thing is, the tool isn't limited to our own sites, and apparently isn't very well secured in any way.

Resolution to burn

[Bullseye_blam]

Sorry, I prefer to keep my [very limited] desktop space.

Thanks anyway!

-Bullseye

Re:Resolution to burn

[iMaple]

Unused !! you must be crazy . My bookmarks toolbar goes there. May be u have a huge monitor and dont care abt destop space but since I run a measly 2048x1780 on my tiny 21inch pda I do need to be stingy abt every pixel.
Anyway do try keeping the bookmarks toolbar next to the menu .. it does save space.

Re:Resolution to burn

[Donny Smith]

> Sorry, I prefer to keep my [very limited] desktop space.

Haven't you seen that ad for large LCD monitors?

You just saved me from installing IE!!!

[cytoman]

Thanks, dude!!!! I was going Cold Turkey without the ads/popups after switching to Firefox... I needed to see those ads so bad that I was about to uninstall Firefox and switch to Windows so that I could use IE!!!!!!

Yay Ads! I was feeling guilty about reading pages without watching ads... I was feeling guilty because seeing content without Ads is like stealing from the content makers. You saved my soul.

Yep it's a joke

[beakerMeep]

From the site: "Can I register and get rid of the ads? Of course! Paypal $19 (51% cheaper than Opera!) to me or the Mozilla Foundation, then use Firefox's Extension Manager to uninstall adbar." What a waste of a parannoid attack I had there. Thanks slashdot.

Re:Google is a special case

[Anonymous Coward]

Sucker.

Well

[mfh]

I'm going to take a funny stance on this subject. Normally I would be annoyed by this sort of thing, but something occured to me when I read this /. article. Because Adbar is *not* spyware, I'm going to install it. I think people should support advertizing projects that take the high moral road. I'm going to reward these guys for staying legit and we'll see how it turns out. I wouldn't mind Google ads on pages I'm surfing, because there might be cool products or services I can buy related to the stuff I'm looking at. And, no, I'm not affiliated with this project in any way, shape or form, so don't ask! :-)

Re:Well

[parksie]

To me, it seems like the same thing as buying a trade magazine (say, Micro Mart in the UK). You are specifically *asking* for adverts on what you're looking at; in effect advertising yourself as a potential and interested buyer.

Re:Well

[GregChant]

I think people should support advertizing projects that take the high moral road. I'm going to reward these guys for staying legit and we'll see how it turns out.

But you're not helping anyone other than the advertisers. The adbar is run in test mode: the developer doesn't make a dime, and google doesn't make a dime.

So, unless you're referring to the moral high road of all advertisers who display web ad content, which I find hard to believe, you're just another schmuck who hasn't read the damn article

Re:Well

[Achoi77]

*woah* did you just insult a 2-digit UID? :-P

All jocking aside, I beleive when grandparent says high moral road he's referring to is adware applications that don't hijack your computer, putting on excess bloat eventually rendering your computer useless on order to force their ads upon you.

Personally I've enjoyed using google's ads, as they offer me more or less the most relevant stuff I'm looking for during my surfing session. If this thing even gets popular, perhaps there will be less and less browser spamming, less pop-ups, less harassment over all. Ok I'll stop dreaming now.

In any case, I find google's ads very non-intrusive, and very relevant - those are the kind of ads I like to see.

Re:Well

[soimless]

My question is if i can Adblock my Adbar?

Re:Well

[robochan]

I think people should support advertizing projects that take the high moral road. I'm going to reward these guys for staying legit and we'll see how it turns out.

I honestly think that's the most grotesque, the most disgusting, thing I ever seen posted to slashdot. If you honestly beieve that ANY advertiser is moving ANY sort of morality - you're in serious need of intensive therapy.
I used to be one of those advertising guys. I was surrounded by like people all the time. No advertising/marketing person that's ever walked this earth has ever given a shit about you, your browser, your wife, your children, your hamster or any moral high ground. The ONLY thing that's cared about is the bottom line.

Re:Well

[halowolf]

All jocking aside, I beleive when grandparent says high moral road he's referring to is adware applications that don't hijack your computer, putting on excess bloat eventually rendering your computer useless on order to force their ads upon you.

Personally, I don't mind getting ads that are relevant and on my own terms. For some reason I quite enjoy looking at shopping catalogues and stuff even though 99% of the time I wouldn't buy anything from them. If there is something that I may be interested in then I don't mind being told about it.

For instance I've got my Amazon recommendations list as part of the Mozilla Browser home tab group. I don't always look at it but I do find something on it every now and then that I am interested in, and best of all it learns my preferences and offers more relevant results. Though it does tend do go off in unexpected directions and makes some less than relevant selected obviously based on keyword association.

Whats important for me is that the advertising is on my terms and not on the terms of someone else. I rarely watch any TV at the time is on and simply time shift it to where I can easily bypass the ads.

I've worked for a number of marketing departments now and every one of them has been focused on getting into the customers mindset anyway they can. None of them seemed concerned about annoying potential customers with advertising that they didn't want. They would run competitions so they could harvest contact details to advertise to consumers with and such and they got mightily offended when I compared their "directed marketing" to SPAM. Oh well...

Re:Well

[BrainInAJar]

" *woah* did you just insult a 2-digit UID? :-P"

He bought it (the UID) on ebay, so it's okay

Re:Well

[bhima]

Who buys trade magazines? You just fill out the zillion question form and they appear at your office for the rest of your life.

Re:Well

[pilybaby]

To me, it seems like the same thing as buying a trade magazine (say, Micro Mart in the UK). You are specifically *asking* for adverts on what you're looking at; in effect advertising yourself as a potential and interested buyer.

Same with almost all mass media. The big guys are big guys because they can subsidise the cost of unit production through selling advertising. Thus the massivly popular labour and union papers that used to be around were brought down explicitly because they didn't sell advertising space and thus couldn't compete on price. Unfortunatly, as soon as one person does it the rest are forced to follow. It's a shame really as I think it's destroyed the news media in the western world (I can't vouch for other parts of the world).

Re:Well

[CaptainZapp]

Wasn' there a French advertiser who has written a book with the title (paraphrased):

Don't Tell My Mother That I Work In Advertising, She Thinks That I'm The Piano Player in a Brothel ?

Don't cross the streams!

[deep square leg]

Don't install it next to Adblock! The meeting of these two opposing super-extensions will create an implosion that shall engulf the entire universe.

A use for those otherwise wasted cycles...

[Chris Brewer]

Install AdBar and Adblock and let 'em fight it out...

What's wrong with you?

[0x0d0a]

Some guy decided to write an extension. It's interesting research -- can ads be made useful enough that people will actively seek them out? It isn't included with Firefox, and it isn't taking up a single byte of your download space. I think that denigrating the guy is going a little bit over the top. He could just as easily say "I'd like to see AssProphet writing some useful open source instead of wasting his time insulting me."

Re:Registering to get rid of ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why pay to remove something you can simply choose to not install in the first place?

Here on Earth, we call this a "joke".

That's the thing about ads

[FunWithHeadlines]

Ads are not inherently evil creations of hellish spawn (although it certainly seems that way at times). I can remember back when I was reading print mags for tech subjects, and being very interested in the ads. They were targeted at a subject I was interested in, and some of the products were products I was thinking of buying. Those ads helped me. I enjoyed seeing them.

Some TV ads are so funny, you look forward to watching them (until you get sick of them.....WISE.....ER......BUD).

I accept the usefulness and necessity of ads for providing "free" access to some information that would not otherwise be free of direct cost (or even possible) otherwise. This may sound surprising to anyone who has read the About page on my web site, where I diss advertising executives. But that's different. I run a hobby site, just for fun, designed to make people laugh and then go about their lives. I pay for this myself and I don't believe advertising belongs on such Web sites, sites the Web was created for (person-to-person communication, not selling wares). But I don't hate advertising as a whole. I just want to see it kept in its proper place.

And if you can make the ads relevant, interesting, useful, and even fun, it helps a LOT.

Re:That's the thing about ads

[jesser]

There are two ways advertisers can "violate your privacy".

* They can send you unwanted advertisements (spam e-mail, junk faxes, telemarketing, adware). With spam and ads from adware, it is often difficult to tell where the ad came from and how to stop receiving ads from that source.

* They can select which ads to show you based on information you consider private, such as demographic information or the contents of e-mails you receive.

I don't mind the second, as long as I don't see ads for porn while someone is looking over my shoulder. Google was wise to make Gmail select ads based only on the current message.

Targeted Ads, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

So based on the assumptions about slashdot users, you will get even MORE ads about "enlarging your member" based on surfing habits.

Re:Targeted Ads, eh?

[Stevyn]

From what I've seen on slashdot, you'll see more ads about how .NET is the best thing since...well...nothing. Ads run the internet. It's a plain and simple fact. There is no way most websites could afford to stay up if it wasn't for ad revenue. And the only way to maximize efficiency is to target the ads specifically to the people who are going to view them. That's why there are so many microsoft ads on this website. But what do I care, it's not going to sway the moderation system so it's not going to make slashdot into another C|NET.

Dealing with ads on the internet is like dealing with commercials on television. Accept them and move on.

How advertising will survive

[Douglas Simmons]

As technology improves, along will consumers' ability to "block" ads, whether on the computer or on television with a tivo-like hack. This is an example of the marketing industry returning fire by making forms of advertisements as appealing as possible to consumers (in this case, by letting them opt-in to receive ads of relevance).

Take the Superbowl, to use television as an example. People tune in to that event even if they're not football fans just to see the ads. Millions were spent on those thirty second spots, and in a situation like that, millions more get spent on ad agencies to come up with entertaining ads.

As more people learn how to "block" ads on different mediums one way or another, the greater the demand will become to write and produce advertisements entertaining enough that people will want to see them in addition to companies creating several different ads at a time so viewers do not get hit with so much repitition. This Firefox plugin illustrates my points by allowing proud consumers to be informed about what they could spend their money on by filtering out ads that will most likely be of no interest to that Firefox user. This way, if Firefox somehow figures out that you already have a big penis by analyzing your slashdot posts, then you won't be seeing that type of spam. Instead you'll be advised of products that your computer deems worthy for that purpose by judging its relevance to your MO (deduced by Firefox from your web behavior).

If ads could be both very entertaining and minimally invasive, in addition to pushing products/services you'd most likely want to buy in a spontaneous situation, why wouldn't you install this? Not all of us are broke, and most of us want more stuff.

I just invented something too

[oasis3582]

I just invented a reverse TiVo. It extracts all the commercials from a given time slot for viewing at a later date! One at a time folks!

Let me get this straight

[cicatrix1]

It advertises for mozilla (in mozilla). It advertises things I'm already looking at. Does it advertise itself? I've been searching for this exact set of features! It's like the second coming!

Honestly

[nwbvt]

I might actually install that if they made so that income generated from selling the ad space went to the mozilla foundation. I'd get to be cheap and financially help out mozilla.

Can I hack it to pay myself?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you run Google ads, Google pays you. Can I program this toolbar so every link I click pays myself?

Kinda like setting up an Amazon affiliate link on your own page to get a 15% discount on books?

Re:Can I hack it to pay myself?

[leathered]

" If you run Google ads, Google pays you."

..in Soviet Russia?

FYI

[mfh]

> you're just another schmuck who hasn't read the damn article

I did RTFA, and I posted my response to it. The fact they are doing the test thing doesn't bother me. Google will likely make them change servers, so it's kind of a non-issue to me. Their product will move to whatever mechanism works. The fact they say you have to pay to be removed is likely a joke, but even if it isn't, I would rather know that kind of stuff *up front* rather than find out after I've installed something that it won't come off (like Gator). And it's the fact they have designed this project knowing full well that many people won't use it because it's ads, but yet they still branched the advertising medium into something else -- something moral -- I just feel like they deserve to get as many people supporting them as they can. Really, wouldn't you like to see the Internet advertising medium shift gears into something that doesn't hijack your computer? I certainly would.

Re:FYI

[misleb]

All you are going to end up with is Adbar AND Gator on your computer. There is no reason to believe that Adbar would replace any other type of advertising. It would just amount to MORE advertising on the Internet. Ads in adbar as well as ads embedded in the site itself. See, the sites you visit want to make money too. It isn't like the money Google would get from this would somehow trickle down to other sites.

Voluntarily installing adbar is stupid. It would be like installing a device that sits on top of your TV and scrolls advertisements while you watch shows... that also have advertisment.

I actually feel this way...

[gerf]

I've recently started to use Adblock with Firefox. Now, not only are all my pop-ups blocked, but I never saw an ad. It seriously took me a week to adjust to actually reading the information in front of me. Before, I'd automatically scan past most pictures and words before reading anything.

Honest to God, it freaked me out. I even mentioned how weird it was to other people. Of course they gave me a weird look by saying all of this, but nevertheless it's true.

Someone's gotta say it...

[Graabein]

1. Create Adbar extension for Firefox, nearly giving a lot of /. readers a heart attack
   
2. Giggle uncontrollably at the predictable fallout
   
3. ???
   
4. Profit!
   

My DVD Player

[Frankie70]

I have hacked my DVD Player to play 5 minutes of advertisements after every 10 minutes of the movie. And my TIVO plays stored ads even when I watch the premium ad free channels.

Re:Flawed analogy

[eric76]

Does Opera have the right to forward me ads because I bought their product?

You must not have tried Opera. If you pay for the license, you don't get the ads. If you don't want to pay, then you get the ads.

I like Opera enough that I did pay for the license. Actually, two licenses - one for Windows and one for Linux.

Personally, I have no problem with a software package having two modes - 1) free but you put up with advertizing and 2) pay with no advertizing.

If the ads are too annoying, I'll never put up with it long enough to decide whether or not I like it enough to pay for it so that there is no advertizing.

Obligatory Penny Arcade Reference

[Sentry21]

If they ever come up with a device for my computer that shoves a hot poker in my ass every so often, I'll be in heaven!

Close...

--Dan

He did buy the uid on ebay

[Anonymous Coward]

who modded this as funny? he did buy the uid on ebay A very little amount of research will also reveal the uid of the user who bought it.

Re:He did buy the uid on ebay

[bgarcia]

Good god!

He paid $115 for that ID! I guess he was sick of his current low karma

LOL!

Does no-one in this thread think it's a joke?

[brainburger]

Does no-one in this thread think it's a joke? It appears to be functional, but it is clearly humourous, satirical, ironic - that kind of thing. Hats off to them.