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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'."
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?"
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.)
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
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.
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.
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).
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?
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
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?
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
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.
When they pack up their toys and go home, I will still be reading Wikipedia.
Greedy bastards, it serves them right!
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.
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.
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.