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DoubleClick Warns Against Ad-Blocking Browsers
An anonymous reader writes "The end of free Internet content will come when Web browsers start blocking online advertisements by default, a DoubleClick executive has warned. Bennie Smith, the online advertising network's privacy chief, said the popularity of tools like Adblock -- an extension to the Mozilla Firefox browser -- which makes blocking online ads simple was tied to 'a negative vibe against advertising in general'."
The end of free web content... ... or the end of (non-commerce) web content for profit?
...Ford warns consumers against public transportation.
My blog
If by "free internet content" he means "obnoxious flash based advertisements" he's right.
Advertising is an important revenue stream, but its not the only revenue available nor the only viable business model. I don't see alot of people blocking Google advertisements since they're non-intrusive and context sensitive... only obnoxious flash based adverts, or banners -- Doubleclick's meal ticket.
FUD by a company executive to protect his business model. Nothing to see here, move along...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
"'a negative vibe against advertising in general'."
.... with it.
Shouldn't abuse it then, should you?
I dont know about anyone else, but I don't mind adverts. It's just the stupid "SMACK THE MONKEY!!!1" type that means I right click, and add them to the block list.
I've no problems with websites advertising, just don't take the
The analogy doesn't hold up. To compare ad-blocking with something that could do the same in newspapers doesn't even make sense. What's really going on (in my opinion) is the natural selection process. Browsers started out simple, naive, and unassuming. Then came the predators... in this case popup ads. Now most browsers offer popup ad blocking or extensions to block popups.
Popup ads are nothing like newspaper advertising -- the dynamic is quite different. For example, if there were the capability and there really was a newspaper that had advertising that actually jumped up in front of what you had started reading, or some other intrusive behavior, that paper would be likely shunned by most consumers and the paper would fail.
Popup ads today are just part of the browser experience and its evolution... but, popup ads are annoying to most, and eventually will (okay, at least should) disappear... advertisers don't like paying for something consumers will never see. Meanwhile I see normal sidebar ads as being sufficient as more people use the internet... I can only speak anecdotally, but if sidebar ads are tastefully done, and well-targeted, it is not unusual for me to click and browse/shop and maybe even purchase. It's similar to the newspaper paradigm... simple, unobtrusive, universally accepted, and usually non-offensive.
I can't imagine an internet incapable of sustaining itself without popup ads... (For the record, there's a certain mortgage/lending institution from which I would never take a loan -- that's how annoying I find their popups.)
Well, there is some truth to it.
I try to unblock ads to my favorite small sites (e.g., sourceforge, slashdot, overclockers, ocforums), especially as survival is not so guaranteed for the smaller sites. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
I have nothing against a page putting ads up; if the ads get too voluminous to read the content I'll simply stop going to that page. But pages that pollute my desktop with pop-ups, especially ones that spawn more when I try to close them, can go to hell. If getting rid of pop-ups means the end of the world-wide web, then go 'head, pull the trigger.
I'm sure we have all seen the new versions of pop-ups that get though firefox, but luckily we can use plug-ins to block them (Adblock), as long as firefox continues to grow they will only get more and more plug-ins to prevent those annoying pop-ups while IE at the same time, lacks these features, it took Micro$oft how long to develop a anti-pop up utility for there browser, it will probably take them as long to make another one for the new versions of pop-ups. That is why firefox will continue to gain market share, because its flexible and can adapt to something much easier.
This is the same industry that wants to put ads on screens above the urinals in restrooms, on electronic screens in shopping carts, and God only knows where else.
Ad blockers are simply a way for 'net users to say "No! You already have enough places to advertise, and I don't want my computer screen to be one of them."
What part of "No!" don't advertisers understand?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Don't know about anyone else, but I can tell you I don't adblock google ads, or any other non-intrusive ads. The ads I block are the ones with the sounds and the moving monkeys telling me to hit them to get a free ipod. I mean jesus christ, you wonder why people want to block your ads?
I pay $39.95/month!
Stop making your ads insulting and ineffcient and people won't block them.
In the age of dialup a simple 3KB page would have >20KB of stupid banner ads and logos.
Now we're in the age of flash popup/under/over/sideways ads that have loud "HEY BUY ME" audio samples and etc..
Yes, an ad has to be noticed. But if it's just too much of a pain in the ass people are going to actively try and ignore them.
For me it has gotten to the point where I actually mute the TV during station breaks because the commercials are not only repetitive and annoying but insulting to my [and anyone over the age of seven] intelligence.
And no, RemodelAmerica, I really don't want your fucking cheap wall siding. Stop paying for EVERY AD SPOT ON THE WEEKEND....
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This is the free market at work. Firefox and AdBlock provide a service that is in high demand: the blockery of ads. Thankfully for all of us, the price is so very low enough that most of us can afford it. Indeed, DoubleClick's days are numbered because they have a very small market these days. And you can't create a market by crying in public like this. You need to buy politicians to enact copyright/patent-style legislation on your behalf.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
If you advertisers hadn't infested the Internet with pop-up, flashing, animated advertisements that dwarfed the actual content, you'd not be in this position. Newspaper ads are given no priority over the content; that's the difference. You can look at one or the other, just as easily. Not so with the crap you put on the Internet.
I have no sympathy at all; you abused your customers, and now they have a "negative vibe." Deal with it.
It's also to do with the advertising sites building sneakier pop-ups, pop-unders, iframes, dialog-like messages, and annoying flashy backgrounds.
And let me be the first to castrate the moron who put the Crazy Frog on flash banners, so they play automatically >:(
Nothing like surfing quietly, and forgetting the speakers were turned up, and jumping when I hear DING-a-ding-ding-ding!
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
If you want people to stop blocking all of your incredibly annoying ads, make them inobtrusive and useful.
Google has the right idea, ads based on the content of the page, taking up just a little space, no animation to draw your attention from the real content on the page. With that method, if I want to find someone who is selling what I just read about, I know where to look!
Don't count your messages before they ACK.
Not capitalism, idiocy.
Doubleclick wants to get rid of the free as in beer internet as well as the free-as-in-Mel Gibson painted blue internet. If they had their way, they would track every single person on the internet and their shopping habits, eating habits, and any other thing that they could figure out how to track, and sell it all to the highest bidder.
Fuck you double-click! If people weren't trying every single underhanded trick to make money on the Internet, the place would be better. Fuck you, fuck your adware-hocking buddies, and fuck Roland Pipsqueakalli for their desperate attempts to make a buck off of my back.
However, there are ads that bother the hell out of me and make me want to block them or stop visiting the page that hosts them. These usually include flash banner ads (shoot the monkey, sink a basket, hit the target, etc.) or animated .gifs or anything else that's more bandwidth intensive than my 56k connection at home can handle in a few seconds. Additionally, ads about products that I don't want or ads that look like scams or phishing attempts really bug me.
It's not the ads that are bad, it's the type, placement, and content of those ads that gets to me.
I don't mind be advertised to. People have to make their money somehow, and if I want to get content for free, the publisher should be able to show me advertisements in order to make money for his/her content.
This advertising space is limited to the page I am viewing. I consider it unacceptable to:
- Show popups.
- Show popunders.
- Spam me.
- Install spyware / adware.
Basically if you advertise in any way that is not confined to the page/window I am viewing, all bets are off when it comes to blocking your advertisements.
Google ads, on the other hand, I have no problem with. They are small (both in terms of content and download size - particularly important if I am using GPRS and paying per byte), unobtrusive, and - most important - relevant. I have even bought things as a direct result of Google ads, something no other advertising mechanism can claim. I have no problem with well-targetted adverts, but blanket adverts just get ignored. Whether the filtering happens in my browser or my brain makes very little difference.
[1] Open in background tab, then close without ever actually looking at the tab.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
These people need to get the message. We don't like advertising. It was reasonably acceptable when it was a little here and there but as it has become more and more in your face it has become some people's mission (mine included) to block it as much as possible.
This isn't to say that I don't appreciate adverts when they are clever and targetted but this is very rare compared with the huge amount of dross that hits our door mats, or spews from every screen or the pages of magazines and poster boards. TiVO, Pithhelmet/adblock and registering with the likes of the Telephone Preference Service etc do make a big difference. I am generally indifferent to advertising these days as a result except when someone really goes out of their way to get to me and that really doesn't make me particularly inclined to listen to their sales pitch.
I find it particularly funny when people say that Mozilla/Firefox/Safari/Opera etc do not render web pages properly when compared to IE and yet when I use Safari or Firefox and filter out all the ads the pages look so much better than they do when using IE so frankly I don't care. And with the move to IE7 do we really think that MS will allow anyone to have something like Pithhelmet/Adblock? Doubtful. In which case I don't think the alternative browsers have anything to worry about for some time.
So, the message for advertisers? Learn the art of subtlety and grow a brain.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
..to control what I see on my screen. Advertising to fund content is not a sustainable business model as too many people are willing to provide genuinely free content.
I do not wish to be advertised at, so I generally refuse to use sites which require me to sign in to use non-commercial services.
I wouldn't be too sad to see the end of commercial websites funded by advertising.... the internet managed long enough before the days of spam and aggressive advertising.
I remember surfing the web with IE5 on Windows 98 and finding advretising totally unobtrusive, with just a banner ad on every page. Then in the space of about 6 months, I started seeing pop-ups, ads with sound, javascript tricks, etc
So now I block all advertising regardless of its nature. Had quite enough of that. And them.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The end of free Internet content will come when Web browsers start blocking online advertisements by default
Then let it end. I'm fed up with the business model of running intrusive advertizing that means nothing but annoying to the viewers.
I'd pay some extra $$$ for better content and service. I know many slashdot readers (read students) are too used to getting many things for free. But that business model CAN'T work for long, as the providers of information need to make some profit somehow. Either you yield to the advertiser's demand or stand against it.
Well the choice is yours. I am to choose against annoying flashy ads and pop-ups (not that I'm getting any of these with Firefox).
Quite frankly, I agree with him.
Most free content on the web is supported by advertising. The advertiser pays the website publisher to display ads on their site, in the hope that they will catch someone's eye. If enough people run ad-blocking software, this will no longer be a viable business model, and most free content on the web will need to find another method of funding.
It's the same issue with TV commercials and TiVo.
You can whine all you want about how evil and annoying the companies are, and say "So what if they're not making any money? Greedy bastards, it serves them right!". But keep in mind, they can always take their toys and go home, and where will that leave you?
Personally, I don't mind putting up with ads. I tune the majority out mentally, and I even occasionally click on an interesting one.
This space intentionally left blank.
Yeah, a lot of AdBlock users aggressively block all ads, period. But a good many of us don't. I block iFrame ads, I block blinky, seizure inducing ads, I block anything that interferes with my ability to *read* the content I'm seeking out. Other than that, I leave 'em in (although I don't load ads from any domain containing the string 'doubleclick,' but I don't think I'm alone there).
What am I getting at here, other than wasting time that could better be spent tweaking queries? Darwinism, selective adaptation, survival of the fittest (or at least the least obnoxious), call it what you will. But if *more* people used AdBlock, and used it selectively, advertisers would quickly learn that people go out of their way to avoid seeing things bouncing around and strobing at 15hz while trying to read the news.
And Flash-based ads... I do a lot of browsing on a laptop. A CPU intensive ad is not only demanding screen real estate, but it is directly limiting my browsing time by using an obscene amount of battery power. I feel *no* guilt at all in using Flash Click To Play to filter *all* those ads, no matter how obnoxious they are or aren't, and no matter how much I may wanna support the site they're on.
Adapt or die. Those advertisers that grep their server logs properly will improve and therefor prosper. The rest? Fuck 'em.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
People wouldn't need to block ads if they weren't so obtrusive and offensive. I would imagine that if advertisement agencies stopped producing obnoxious ads that block you from viewing content, launch endless pop-ups, and are otherwise incredibly annoying then people will stop blocking them. Honestly, who adblocks google ads?
These ad companies seem to think that, by not viewing their advertisement, you're somehow stealing from them.
What if I don't block them, but I conciously refuse to ever click on one? Is that any different? How about if I make a point of never buying any product I see an ad for online? How about if I just ignore ads?
How is blocking them any different?
I'm not going to get a mortgage from some online bank. I'm not going to buy a car just because I saw an ad for one. No amount of advertising will change that.
I block ads because it's convenient to do so. Were this somehow impossible, no one would get any more revenue out of me than they do currently.
So basically, I don't see what the issue here is. (And don't give my any bullshit about "branding." That's a load of crap.)
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
I have taken to using Adblock, but I only use it to block advertisers who actively annoy me. Pop-ups always result in me blocking the advertising firm. Otherwise, I tolerate advertisers that do not cross my threshold since I do generally wish to support sites that I visit.
Wikileaks, no DNS
I can't wait either. I surely don't remember any advertising when I was using Google.
:)
One fundamental problem is, popularity comes at a price. Your website is more popular, more bandwidth gets used. More bandwidth gets used, your hosting provider charges you more.
It's not so with TV shows. The costs are the same whether 8 people or 8 billion people watch it. Of course, if you have consistently low ratings, advertisers don't want to pay you for their ads.
If internet technologies get to the point where bandwidth is maybe at a flat fee(for outbound traffic), or something of the like, perhaps advertising won't be so promiment.
But as it stands now, advertising is getting to the point where it is overshadowing original content. Now only if we had more original content instead of the same AP news stories repeated over and over. Ah crap, I just realized what website i was on.
Advertising will never go away. It will just become more insidious. In a way, I think adblocker and the like are akin to people taking anti-biotics every time they get a sniffle. It just ends up creating new strains of antibiotic resistant germs which, eventually will not be able to be combatted.
Today, it's relatively easy to spot the advertising within the page to block it out. Eventually, advertising will become so integrated with the content that you can't automatically detect and strip it out.
I agree whole heartedly with blocking truly annoying forms of advertising, such as popups, but to block all advertising, including stuff that goes out of its way to not be annoying (such as Google Ad Sense) is really just shooting ourselves in the foot.
We want to encourage non-annoying advertising!
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
From TFA
"In an offline world, what would happen in that case is that the 25c newspaper would cost $5," he said.
Apples and Oranges bud. In a paper, the ad doesn't redirect you to a [potentially rogue] site. How many users get linked to a Flash or JavaScript heavy ad with pop-ups? These ads are the bane of users everywhere, in particular those with slow connections.
I absolutely HATE a js or flash ad that I can't get rid of, that prevents me from seeing page content, or slows/hangs my machine.
Besides, click-through ads do NOT work as a form of advertising. 90% of internet users do not click through intentionally. Read: dot-crash, not a revenue model.
Given the opportunity to NOT download that 500k jpg... I'd take the opportunity.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
I agree. But let me just say that I really didn't mind static ads. After all, the internet was originally a static medium and, like newspapers, one expects some nice little static ads.
It was when these retardo-bozos began the damned flash ads that winked and blinked until they drove you nuts that I began to get angry. When the damned ads started getting up and marching across the screen like wooden soldiers in a little kid's dreams, I began to get apoplectic. Then you couldn't even click on a link without being redirected to an ad page before being permitted to see what you wanted to see.
And somewhere along the way these veritable cretinous lunatics decided that they had the right to set malicious cookies that would phone home everytime you turned on your computer thus slowing down your boot time and generally mucking up the innards of YOUR VERY OWN computer paid for with your hard earned dollars. And this character has the nerve to threaten us with the DEATH OF THE INTERNET!!! if we don't stop preventing him from annoying us.
Yes, I agree. Screw you double-boner and the rest of your silly fannies.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
Smith is obviously oblivious. He's talking as if the kind of intrusive, evasive ads his company does are the only kinds out there. To counter that, I'd point to Google. Google runs plenty of ads. They make lots of money off their ads. And nobody's up in arms about their ads, nor do you see anything being added to browsers to block them. That's because Google's ads are, as in a newspaper, clearly distinct from the content and don't interfere with the user getting at the actual content they're there for. And the ads are, gods help me, actually useful. More often than not, if I'm looking to buy what I'm searching for I find myself clicking through Google's ad links because I've found I'm likely to be able to buy what I was looking for. Smith simply isn't getting the hint, and if he doesn't he and the marketers like him will naturally go the way of the dinosaurs.
As for free content disappearing, I doubt it. Content supported soley by intrusive ads will disappear, but there's a lot of content out there that won't be affected:
Yes... in fact i thought about this:
Imagine you're reading a newspaper.
Suddenly a clown springs from the newspaper and begins yelling offers at you.
You suddenly flip the page to get rid of him. Then a monkey starts bothering you until you punch him. But when you do, an executive salesman comes out from the alley and tells you "Hello! You won a prize! Please sign!"
"Get away from me!" You run away, and sit in a bench. "Now, where was I?" you say, as you flip to the next page.
Then a gorgeus girl starts flirting with you, until you notice she begins to pick your pocket. You quickly flip the page.
"HELP!!" you yell. Then you hear a "psst psst" from the back of the newspaper. It's a firefox.
It comes out, and scares all those annoying people away. You feel it's friendly, so you let it rest on your shoulder.
Now you can read your newspaper in peace.
(hey can someone make an internet ad out of this idea? It's public domain)
Doubleclick and its cronies have been indirectly stealing people's money for years. Why does the average Joe switch from dialup to cable/DSL? Because these stupid Flash ads and images keep clogging bandwidth like crazy. Now that cable/DSL has overtaken dialup, Doubleclick can make more money by placing even more obnoxious ads on pages.
Also, look at some of the ads these guys put out: "Congratulations! You have won our hourly prize! Click OK to claim it," not bothering to tell you that you will have to give plenty of personal information, which is at their disposal to sell to spammers. "Shoot the villain and win a free iPod/Xbox!" At the very bottom of this ad is white text on a light backgroud saying "With participation in our program."
Not to mention the fact that they put adware/spyware on your computer without your consent or even your knowledge. Granted, this is only a minor problem if you are a more educated user who has a spyware removal tool and runs Windows Update regularly (if you have Windows), but it's still a problem. While Doubleclick may have a right to place ads on pages, they have no right to exploit people.
On top of that, the executive's warnings are completely unfounded. IE still takes up most of the browser market, and how many average users who happen to have tried Firefox would even know that it supports extensions, much less even know that Adblock exists?
This might mean the end of a lot of free content, but it won't mean the end of peoples desire to publish. And computers are cheap. And getting cheaper. And bandwidth is cheap. And getting cheaper. So anyone can publish, and peer to peer is getting better. And ISPs like to make money.
If all the advertising in the world dried up tomorrow, there would be an instant and huge opportunity for ISPs that provided good, seamless and easy P2P publishing, because whichever ISP provided it would be the one providing the free content.
It's not hard to imagine a scenario where this happens. It might spell the end of a lot of the crappy "me too" technical review sites and others of their ilk who are churing out mediocre content purely for the money, but a good reputation is still a valuable thing, and being published and respected worldwide is still a valuable personal asset.
I imagine that there'd be another greed-based crisis later when the ISPs try to leverage access to the content it's users create as a means of getting more users by cutting off access to other ISPs unless they pay, until we end up with a global monopoly in the ISP market or we collectively call for the governments to step in and roll ISP services into their basic tax-funded infrastructure.
Regardless, the people are collectively happy to publish for free, they want to read what other people have written, they don't want to be manipulated by scumbag advertisers when they do it, and they are already paying money every month
for access to the internet. That is a market waiting to be tapped.
So fuck off and die, doubleclick. We don't need you.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I use Mozilla and Firefox and regularly block ads, but I only block ads that prance, dance, blink, flash, bounce, jiggle, and otherwise annoy the crap out of me.
Those kinds of ads are not acceptable, because they're really distracting when you're trying to read and comprehend the real content of the web page.
I never bother to block normal ads, because they don't annoy me. Sometimes, they even look interesting, and I click on them.
Perhaps if advertisers would stop making obnoxious ads, there wouldn't be as much demand for ad blockers. But they've already shown themselves to have incredibly poor taste in ad design. Recall the living hell the web was before pop-up blockers became popular?
I suspect this is one of those areas where advertisers will just plain never get it, doing their best to make their ads stand out as much as possible...which is synonymous with making them obnoxious.
Whether you looked or not, they think you did and that only encourages them. They take that as a view, an impression. They take that set of eyeballs and turn around and sell it as more positive feedback. "This add is working, it's getting more views, let's keep doing this"
Of course, if you wanted to do it right you would create a script to continually download their images and any other large objects. They'd get the clicks but no revenue off the spent bandwidth. Eventually if you were irritating enough they might BLOCK YOU (In Soviet Russia advertising company blocks you, heh)
MOST free content on the web is supported by advertising?
Come on, that's... (charitably) WRONG.
MOST of the content on the web is on the edge; supplied by individuals. And that's where the growth is, too.
Just look at how much BitTorrent traffic is carried.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Even *if* EVERYONE was automatically filtering out the traditional (BIG-annoying-BLINKBLINK-CLICKMENOW!) ads by default, it wouldn't be the "end of free internet content". For one thing, the cost of hosting has dropped dramatically since the Adfree-early-90's, but more importantly, money isn't the incentive that gets the best content online.
And about the complaint against Firefox:
1) Firefox's Adblock extension isn't installed by default, and very few people install extensions.
2) The Adblock extension doesn't come with a prepopulated blocklist - you have to create your own as you go or download one. 3) Far more adblocking is probably done by corporate proxies to pinch pennies.
Power to the Peaceful
No, it's an end to easy money for DoubleClick. Now they'll have to reinvest some of their annoyingly-gotten gain into producing ads that people don't go to lengths to block. Like ads for products people want to know about, without destroying their multimedia experience. Otherwise, DoubleClick will just keep reinvesting in whining about losing their right to annoy you.
--
make install -not war
Becasue the blink and have moving pictures.
I will block all das like that. Google did this right, and I don't block there ads.
'Ok, Slashdot editors, I want to read your magazine, but I do not want to let you earn any money for running it.'
And?
"Any other behaviour is immoral"
from dictionary.com:
immoral Audio pronunciation of "immoral" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (-môrl, -mr-)
adj.
Contrary to established moral principles.
your statement seems to be false. nobody, except you and advertisers, considerd viewing ads a moral principle.
" (some would even call it stealing)."
they would be wrong.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
naw, thye'll become less insidous and more helpfull. as many people here have pointed out, google seems to hit the nail on the head with it's advertising model.
I have found google ads to be the first that are actually usefull and helpfull.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
AdBlock and similar products exist because advertising has become so obtrusive that it prevents the software installed on your computer as well as the content on websites from being useful.
The worst offender I've seen lately was a new "punch the monkey" style add. It was flash based of course. Normally these ads are just animated banners, but the designer of this one got the clever idea of putting sound into the ad. The chosen sound was quite possibly the most obnoxious sound possible. It sounded like my speakers were pumping out radio static.
Now this is a flash ad right, so you should be able to right click on it and stop it from playing, and stop the flash from looping. Nope. The creator of the flash disabled all controls. The location of this advertising wasn't bad, it wasn't obtrusive, it wasn't in the way, but it was still noticeable. The problem was, I was jamming to my iTunes library at the time, something totally unrelated to web browsing.
Advertisers: This is your problem. You removed all control. My only options were to not read the content at all or block your ad. Seeing as the content was important to me, the only option left to me was to install AdBlock. And as you had just royally pissed me off, I didn't just block the one ad that was annoying me, I blocked all the advertising from your domain(s). If you've let one obnoxious ad get out to the internet, I'm sure it's not the only one.
Go out there and learn some principles of user interface design. One of them is that the user should feel in control. As soon as you remove control, the user is going to take action to regain control. Pop-Ups and Pop-Unders are other good examples. You're creating new windows that I didn't ask for! Not only are they getting in the way of my web browsing, they are getting in the way of other things I'm doing on my computer. Again, my options are to block advertising or close my web browser. Both are options you don't want, so don't force me to take these actions in the first place.
I do not mind ads on web pages myself. I don't even mind transition advertising where you click a link, and instead of getting the next page of an article you are reading you get a full page advertisement, and another link to continue to your article. Where web pages use these "transition" ads I've felt they were relevant to the content was viewing, and felt no need to block them.
Any time I'm not in control of what my computer is up to, you've gone too far and you have left me with no choice but to install ad blocking software. If you had left the user in control of their computer, you would have had much less to worry about. Now though, your practices have spawned countless pieces of ad blocking software. The software was made to block the obnoxious ads that should never have existed, but now that it's out there, there is no stopping it from blocking everything your industry does. You left us users with no other choice, and now you will feel the consequences of your actions.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Because after all, we all know that before the WWW ad boom of 2000, there was no content on the web.
Oh wait - I think I have that backwards - there was *better* content on the web *before* the major corperations and their ads came on.
You -> Foot -> Mouth
I may one day buy a new car, Ford/Chevy/etc. I may not. Either way, it's totally uninfluenced by your billions of dollars a year in ad money.
You say this, but you don't truly know to what extent you've been influenced.
When McDonalds first started running adds referring to themselves as "Mickey-dees", I was galled at what a blatant and rediculous attempt it was to gain "street cred". Surely this will never work, said I.
2 months later, and millions in advertising, I start hearing people say "lets go to Mickey-Dees".
Noone in their right minds thinks that when they pop the top of a Budweiser *ugh*, buxom swimsuit models will randomly show up and start partying. But I'd be willing to bet that somewhere in anheiser busches marketing department there is a graph that shows a direct correlation between the number of buxom lasses in ads, and the ammount of money they get from the 18-25 year old market. Sorry for the off topic rant.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Precisely!
I don't block:
A simple, static (per-view) banner doesn't bother me. Advertizing related to the content doesn't bother me. Pretty, but subtle, images that fit the color scheme and page layout of the site are just fine.
What I will block every time are
I block everything from doubleclick.net, for instance.
sigs, as if you care.
Advertizers need to see the entire page as a single entity that will be viewed by the user and figure out how to work within those constraints.
Writing a good page requires good content and an artists eye for presentation.
What? ®
Reasons why I oppose advertisement as a principle:
I think the world would be better if we cut out the enormous waste of resources the advertisers make, the waste of everyones time when viewing advertisements, and the damage caused by biased and untrue information.
I think what the grandparent is trying to say is that a cookie is merely a small piece of text, usually with an identifying number, left in the cookie cache of your web browser with an ID linked to the URL that created it. It is a piece of text, not a program.. unable to "phone home" as it were or store any other information besides with the creator of the cookie put into it. They cannot collect information about other things and store them for later retrieval from the company.
You're computer will not get slowed down by cookies (once again, just small text files). Certain programs such as adaware will however recognize malicious cookies as being ones that are used to track your movement on the internet. The way that this works is dozens of websites participate in allowing the tracking company (such as doubleclick) to read their own cookie each time you connect to the site. So if you went to say msn's website and they were using doubleclick's tracking cookies, they would send a request to doubleclick to check for their cookie before msn sends its page info. Doubleclick would then go "ah yes, our cookie is here.. this is user ID *some ID number*. Let us update our database which has a primary key of that number to add the information that this user has visited msn at this time today".
Cookies are not all bad, they help to keep track of state (such as shopping carts or login info) across pages.. as html was designed as a static medium.
Err.. so anyway.. Cookies didn't slow down your computer. It was probably spyware/malware from p0rn sights or Gator or some shit like that.
Bennie Smith is entirely correct -- if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web.
No. It means that if ad blocking becomes standard, it will pose a threat to bouncing, popping, blinking, annoying graphical ads on the web. Text ads do not get in the way, do not distract, and do not get blocked.
The fact that Mr Smith sells bouncing, popping, flashing, annoying graphical ads may have something to do with his opinion.
Note to marketers: It is possible to reach your target audience without annoying everyone else.
Very few ad blocker programs block ads that are not attempting to do something abusive. It is about blocking intrusive and abusive ads. Doubleclick and ilk want huge centralized databases of personal information and push formats like audio/popup/popunder/floating ads that actively interfere with people using the web.
It is as if you were reading a magazine and everytime you turned the page someone shoved a sign between you and the magazine and wouldn't let you read until you signed something and crumpled the ad up and threw it away.
The free market is just telling marketers don't be evil. Doubleclick is unhappy because their business model is to be as evil as we want to be.
It is noticable that only marketers appear to believe that intrusive advertising (whether you are talking telesolictors, door-to-door salesmen or popups) is something people actually want.
I think lot of you guys don't understand how internet advertising work.
Without a doubt, I'm in favor of non-annoying ads. But I do want to see ads on my favorite sites so that these sites can make money and continue to operate. If all I have to do is view ads and sometimes click on a few to support these sites, it's lot better than me paying $2-5 a month to view that site.
Besides that point...it's not Doubleclick that's putting popups and rollovers and floaters on your favorite websites. It's the websites. Someone can't put a full page ad on LA Times without LA Times working on that ad. Same with ads on the internet. Everything is at the Web publisher's discretion. Unless...they turn over all their page impressions to these ad networks (fastclick, etc...) without approving any ads. That in turn, is webpub's responsibility.
Our society has turn more and more selfish where people only think about themselves. Like all the users who block ads to an ad supported site that they visit frequently...and advertisers who do whatever they can to get their message across without caring about how annoying it is to the users.
He said if a similar tool could be produced for newspapers, it would not be accepted by consumers.
Yes, but in the case of internet ad-blocking, the tool has been not only ACCEPTED but DEMANDED by consumers.
Check out the marketing for any Internet Service Provider. All the major providers and many of the smaller ones now advertise "popup blockers" as features of their service. People demanded that something be done about the decrease in usability caused by intrusive advertising, and the ISPs responded.
DoubleCock has no one to blame for the proliferation of ad blocking besides the proliferation of annoying ads, and they themselves pioneered that field.
Most websites have so much advertising you can't tell it from the actual content. Some are pretty much all advertising. To paraphrase a quote about TV, the web is pretty much a "vast, pock-marked wasteland."
On another point, nothing on the Internet has ever been free. I pay for access as well as the webmaster, and he may also pay for hosting his website. These expenses are paid regardless of advertising. Advertising revenue only offsets those expenses.
As to the particular FA, this is like spammers claiming that spam blocking will result in the end of email. I see what he's saying from an economic standpoint, but I don't really have any sympathy for him.
It's a very dark ride.
You can set adblock to do just that. You have the option of merely hiding the images or not even downloading them.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
There once was a day when sites like Tom's Hardware, Anandtech, et al. reviewed the good, bad & ugly... Now there's a strange correlation between all the XYZ brand items reviewed and the XYZ brand banners all over the place... God forbid you post a negative review of an advertiser!
no.
The only thing I want them to know is what I am currently(as in at the moment) interested in finding.
If I go to a sight that is about cars, then there should be advertising geared towards cars.
If I do a search on 'Golf' then a few non intrusive ads about golf would be WELCOME.
But I do not want them to track me from place to place, because the ads will very quickly become irrelevant noise.
They also fail to recognize that many people may use the same computer. once again every user is targetted with ads that might be interesting to every other user on that computer. once again, it just becomes noise.
They do not need to know my gender, age, race, height, favorite color, or my dogs middle name.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When you're in the mood for a read, you read. So the ads in magazines and newspapers match the type of sensory input you have chosen which is READING, and don't require any action to un-obscure what you are reading. Popup ads transform the passive act of reading into a forced interactive one.
When you watch a TV show or movie on TV you're in a video watching mode and ads while sometimes obnoxious or overly abundant don't tend t to be a jarring experience because they are presented in the same sensory input experience you have chosen to engage in. Ironically while many TV ads employ printed text also, it is rarely the only content of the ad and tends to be supplementary. If during your 30 minute viewing of a TV show you were subjected to 7 minutes of static, music less, text only ads you would probably have a similar amount of irritation.
For websites and games that are interactive in nature I predict the acceptance of popup type ads should/would be better since you would already be in an interactive mode state of mind. At $50 dollars a pop no one would tolerate active popup style ads in video games, but if Pepsi or Coke sponsored free game content that rivaled paid game content then you can bet game players would tolerate (with little complaint) interactive ads built into the game at between level intermissions. Call me immodest, but I would be surprised if my little post here doesn't start the hamster wheel turning in some marketing type's head (granted this idea has already been implemented to varying degrees already, and is no doubt in some stage of development somewhere for something by somebody).
My advise to advertisers who don't want to be hated, if not to be considered downright EVIL, don't mix modes when presenting ads. People have expectations for the types of experiences they engage in and don't want to be forced into another one involuntarily.
Letter To Iran
Rule for on-line advertisements that should be implement immediately:
1 No blink tags, ever.
2 No purple/green backgrounds, fonts or images unless they occur in nature.
3 No bouncy ads, ads that pop in the middle of what you're reading or try to pop up windows.
4 No ads embedded in the web page so I can't block the really annoying ones.
5 Keep the ads at the top, bottom, right or left gutters. Ads in the middle of text shall be considered an offense punishable by death.
If advertisers would just follow these simple rules the market for ad-blockers would evaporate overnight.
Now this is a flash ad right, so you should be able to right click on it and stop it from playing, and stop the flash from looping. Nope. The creator of the flash disabled all controls.
Why do you have a plugin installed that lets you have such little control?
Uninstall it, call the plugin vendor and explain why you will not use their product until the necessary features are implemented; convince as many others as possible to do the same.
Part of the problem for advertisers here is the same as I have posted before. When web ads consisted of a simple banner or two, most people didn't particularly mind. They treated them much like magazine or newspaper ads (that is, mostly ignored them.
Personally, when that's the extent of the ads, I just ignore them in place. However, if they try to pop up, over, under, through, whatever, they're toast. If they insist on jumping around like a chihuahua on speed, I block the entire ad server. Same for those that look like a Happy Llama production with horrific (and headache inducing) flashing red and yellow background.
Doubleclick, in particular, with their 'pioneering' efforts at tagging users like animals and tracking them earned a special place in my hosts file (127.0.0.1) well before there was adblock.
Advertisers need to realize that they are like the friend of the host's friend at a party. If they behave, they may stay, but if they insist on cleaning out the fridge, ruining the coffee table and peeing in the sink, they won't be welcomed again.
well, i didn't really know about the adblocking extension for firefox until reading this. now i will definitely use it. i don't think that's what they had in mind by complaining, but it brought more attention to the capability.
I agree that deception is one of the biggest problems, but there is also another major problem - visual accessibility.
I myself have Firefox set to override colors on web pages in favor of a white-on-black scheme, because too much light bothers my eyes. Therefore, the familiar "You have won our hourly prize," for example, with all of its colors and blinking can really make things hard to see. General movement in Flash animations along the side of the site can also be a pain. All of these obnoxious ads can make it very difficult to focus. I cannot tell my browser to block all images because there may be a diagram or something that is part of the page itself.
Some people actually need Adblock so they do not spend hours trying to discern a single paragraph! Or, why can't ads simply be small boxes saying "Try Vanilla Coke" or something?
At my first exposure to the Internet, it was nearly perfect. Consisting of little more than a collection of websites that people found interesting, informative, and/or fun. It was based on people/institutions wanting to share knowledge and experience, not entities looking to extract my cash, or make a quick buck.
Those sites that did have something to sell, actually had product that would sell based on its merit, not because it was hosted on a "cool" site with free games, discounts, etc. Why do I care if whatever goofy-dumb-site, paid for by dubbaklik.dumb, goes away? I sincerely doubt that the Internet(world) will be a worse place for it.
If I am searching for a product, or service, I want to let the search engine find it. When/if I find what I am looking for, I then make my purchase. If I don't find it, then maybe I don't really need it. (Hint here: products.google.com, services.google.com???)
I don't want to look at advertising, no matter how it manifests itself (e.g. Pop-Ups, Banners, etc.), even if it is something I might want. I make it a point to NOT purchase a product or service, if they try to advertise like this. If dubbakilk.dumb can't make their business model work because of my choice not to view ads like theirs, then they need to change their business model, right?
This guy is simply whining because his gravy train is going away, and he might actually have to innovate and add real value for the consumer, to make his business model work.
I feel that if a product, or service, is worth purchasing, the site of the seller will be able to make the sale, without getting in my face.
Don't threaten me with crap websites going away, because you'll find that's exactly what I want!
They call us sheeple, I wonder why?
The fix to your proposed solution would be to have the browser download the ad, but Adblock would make it so the ad is not displayed in the browser window. That way, the content providers would have no way to know who is actually seeing the ads. This would actually put the advertisers in a worse position, because a significant portion of their bandwidth would now be completly wasted, making their margins even slimmer (though I'm sure quite a few people would see this as a good thing).