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'."

Comments

popup ads, not the same as newspaper ads

[yagu]

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.)

Re:popup ads, not the same as newspaper ads

[tourvil]

Instead of blocking the ads you should either subscribe or stop reading it. Any other behaviour is immoral (some would even call it stealing).

Out of curiosity, do you think that changing channels on the TV when a commercial comes on is immoral or stealing?

Geez Louise...

[KC7GR]

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?

Who says the Internet is free in the first palce?

[Bravoc]

I pay $39.95/month!

Indeed, this is the free market at work.

[CyricZ]

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.

Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work.

[AviLazar]

That mindset plays along with the "It's okay to pirate software because I am not denying anyone of the software, i am just copying it." Someone put effort into this website. Someone is paying for the hosting, bandwidth, etc. If people do not subscribe or view the ads then they are getting the material totally for free. If the people who make this site are losing money (and they are not wealthy enough to keep it going) the site will be lost.

Blocking ad's will only lead to innovation in terms of people trying to circumvent the pop-ups, and other people trying to figure ways to prevent that. In the end - it is a cat and dog chase and it is a waste of our resources. I would rather see us live in harmony (as far as internet/advertising goes) and working on creating better services.

Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work.

[Viceice]

Bennie Smith is entirely WRONG.

2 Facts:

1) People will always want things free (As in paid for by ad's)

2) If the people who serve ads as we know it today die off, soemone else will come back and fill the void.

People do tolorate and to a certain extent, apreciate ads, but the reason why people block ads today is because the people serving ads are crap flooding people with annoying devices like pop-up that serve up lies, half truths and spyware.

The advertiser who learns the rule of doing it in moderation and not pissing off your audience is the one whose gonna make it, not scum like DoubleClick.

In essence, this whole mess is the advertising industries own fault, not the fault of the makers of ad blocking software.

Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work.

[aklix]

Well it will also lead to innovations in new types of ads. I personally don't block google ads because not only are they lightweight and unobtrusive, but many times I find relivent information. Innovations need to come from comprimises, not from force like charging to view a web page.

Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work.

[AndersOSU]

I love my adblock, and my flashblock.

It seems to me that doubleclick.net is in trouble because they've annoyed so many people that someone else has decided to do something about it. Opening up my adblock black list, I can see that doubleclick.net is the very first entry.

What free sites need to do is find a marketing firm taht doesn't have obnoxious ads, then they'll stay in buisness, because people won't block what isn't annoying.

Case in point: Just for shits and giggles I opened up the article in IE, and what do you know there's an delightful to look at marque add promenently displayed at the top of the page (provided by doubleclick no less.)

When advertisers realise that people visit websites because of the content, not to look at ads maybe they'll place less obtrusive, non-flash ads that don't encroach on the content.

When that happens maybe I'll stop blocking ads, or maybe the damage has already been done.

Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work.

[badasscat]

Innovations need to come from comprimises, not from force like charging to view a web page.

First of all, let's can the idealism and be a little realistic here. You're a web site publisher with little ad revenue left. What do you do? Your training is not in marketing, it's maybe in business development. Are you going to sit there and try to invent a new form of advertising that isn't patented by Google, or are you just going to say "screw it" and charge for the use of your site?

You can hope all you want that people will innovate; the reality is most web site owners are only in it for the money. They don't care about compromise and even if they did, they wouldn't know where to even start coming up with new revenue streams.

I think this is what gets lost in these discussions. You can call it short-sighted, you can call it whatever you want, but the fact is the owners of most web sites are not innovators and never claimed to be. All they want to do is put out a product and make money doing it. If they have exhausted one method, they will simply move on to the next rather than trying to come up with something entirely new. And there's not even anything wrong with this; this is the way small businesses in this country have always worked. It's not up to every guy who runs a bakery or a stationary store or whatever to come up with entirely new business models whenever they hit hard times, and nobody expects them to - yet for some reason, people do expect that when it comes to the web.

Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work.

[TGK]

Lets continue your analysis (acutaly, this would be a good Slashpole -- Editors? Catch that?) -- Who blocks Google Ads? Really?

I don't. I have Adblocker installed, I have it configured to display Slashdot's ads because I typicaly click on them on accident if I don't. I have doubleclick blacklisted because their ads are irritating.

In fact, no one I know blocks Google ads. They're unobtrusive, helpful, and direct me towards the products and services I'm allready looking for. Why would I block them? They're like a yellow pages for the internet.

So really, its the people that sell advertising space to herbal viagra vendors on their Disney fan site that are going to suffer, not people like Google.

Build ads that don't piss me off. I have never blocked an ad that didn't piss me off.

Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work.

[Nogami_Saeko]

Ah, bingo. You've hit the nail on the head.

I only block stuff that's obtrusive to me:

-If it moves, flashes, animates or makes noise, it's gone
-If they try a popup/popunder, it's gone

Static ads don't annoy me (much like the newspaper he was mentioning), and I don't block them.

Oh, and I also block additional ads on any sites I pay to access - if I'm already paying their subscription fee, I deserve an advertising-free environment.

N.

Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work.

[Chris Burke]

They complain endlessly about the negative "vibes" towards advertising, yet they take no responsibility for creating these "vibes" in the first place. No one had a problem with Internet ads before DoubleClick started tracking people.

This can't be emphasized enough: Doubleclick is the one at fault. Any problem they perceive with ad blocking is a direct consequence of their own actions. They are the ones that made online advertising annoying, intrusive, and invasive of privacy. They are the ones that made everyone hate internet advertising. How many of us first learned how to use /etc/hosts to block doubleclick.net?

It is exactly like them to say it is our fault for not wanting to be annoyed with pop-ups, pop-unders, mouse-dodging javascript widows that pop up fifteen new windows when you manage to close them while simultaneously tracking every single site we ever visit. We all know about Google ads -- ads I've actually clicked on in order to buy product, not just a fake click to throw a website a click-through's worth of revenue. Good behavior gets rewarded. But Doubleclick thinks it is our behavior that needs to change. We should just accept whatever crap they want to foist on us, apparently. Why won't we just bend over?

And as far as "a negative vibe against advertising in general" -- he's goddamn right! Because most advertisers are just like Doubleclick. Advertising is everywhere, and designed to be as obnoxious as possible. Like with television ads, which can be severely annoying and thus causes people to hit the mute -- or record the show and then skip the ads. Just like with those bastards at Doubleclick, Television advertisers have only come up with two ideas on how to fix this:

1) Make the ads even -more- obnoxious and hard to avoid.

2) Chastise us for not wanting to be annoyed.

If you read the TFA, you'll see that he really believes he has purchased our eyeballs. No, you fool, you payed a website to put your ad on their page. I'm under no obligation to look at the thing. You might think I owe you my eyeballs, but I never agreed to be given a headache by a flashing ad that pops up when I leave that page.

Bennie is right about one thing, though: His company's behavior is going to kill internet advertising that tries to grab eyeballs through irritation. I doubt the 'free' internet will end, because Google already has shown how you can make money off advertising and not piss people off. But even if he is right and a substantial portion of the internet is incapable of adapting to a world where the people are in control of what they see, I have only one thing to say:

Good. I hope they die off as quickly as possible. I want some serious Darwin shit to go on here, and I want it to be clear that the ones that will survive are the ones that can make money without pissing me off.

Doubleclick and every advertiser like them needs to die. We will make them an evolutionary dead end. And despite all their screaming, once they are gone, buried, and slowly turning into some future generation's gas we'll find out that we never needed them at all.

Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work.

[FLEB]

Bakeries and stationery stores don't have to retool their business models, because their business models aren't broken. (Although, those suffering from WalMartization might be forced to, just as ad companies suffering from blocking are forced to change.) The advert model in its current form is, appearantly, broken.

If the content draws enough people, and the owner wants it to persist, it (generally) will. A free/paid mix of content can be set up. The provider can monetize in different ways, such as audience data mining, affiliate plans, or swag sales. They can set up a "tip jar". They can network with other similar sites to make a network and take advantage of numbers. They can minimize costs by taking advantage of things like mirroring or BitTorrent. They can take advantage of their community by putting out a call for mirrorers. They can offload the content to a mailing list to relax web bandwidth needs. The can open-license the content and let it prosper in fansites.

Or, there's always failure. Not all ideas are good, and not all should be treated like they are.

Re:cry me a river

[TheRaven64]

Exactly. Seeing large, flash animations telling me about a service I am completely uninterested in irritates me. Sometimes I click[1] on them on the basis that it will cost someone money and not give them any sales.

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.

AdBlock: reserving the right...

[CdBee]

..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.

Adblock

[Morosoph]

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.

Re:cry me a river

[man_of_mr_e]

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!

Re:Good call

[Spy der Mann]

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)

Re:cry me a river

[iced_773]

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?