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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'."
I don't care. The ad industry has gotten so obnoxious and full of itself, I want to see it die, and I don't care what it takes with it.
I know this is probably not in my own best interest, but, like I said, I don't care. When I get this pissed off about a thing, sometimes logic goes out the window, and what will happen to the 'free internet' is secondary to my desire to see slimeballs like that double-click guy flushed down the crapper.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Actually, free-rider situations like this are precisely where market forces don't work efficiently. Everyone reading this site while blocking ads is able to do so only because of people like me who do view them (and subscribers). And I free-ride at the expense of people who are willing to view pop-ups.
Bennie Smith is entirely correct -- if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The freerider problem only applies to public goods that are excludable and rival. The Internet is neither excludable nor rival, and therefore is not a public good. And since it is not a public good, the freerider problem does not apply to it.
Blocking ads won't end free content on the Web. It will lead to innovation and new opportunities.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
If I block ads, it's also true that if I didn't, I still wouldn't buy their lameass products. Me watching their brain-torturous manipulative garbage will never, ever convert to a sale.
So, let me turn off adblock, so I can watch them still wither into nothingness. I'm no longer a free-rider, they just bought something with their advertising that wasn't ever going to pay off, my eyeballs.
Some advice, 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. Keep that money, and buy something with it. More R&D, lower prices, hell, have the biggest hooker and booze party on planet earth, it matters not. This goes for people who sell laundry detergent, fast food, and video games.
Doubleclick is their own worst enemy. It's not just the trashy ads, but their spyware cookies and other means of tracking internet users. Here's a clue for those bastards: We're not here for your convenience. We pay for our bandwidth and that doesn't mean you're entitled to it. If your customer sites want to find a different way to make money, have at it. Another site will find a less obtrusive way to get their advertising in front of consumers by offering the same content. That's the way the free market works. They win, you lose. And it couldn't happen to a more deserving company.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Free-riding spares people's bandwidth... I never purchased anything from banner ads before adopting ad-blockers and am extremely unlikely to ever do. By free-riding, I am sparing the advertiser/host's bandwidth along with my own.
When advertisers started using Flash animations with SOUND, I snapped and decided to go on a quest for absolute free-loading. The only ads I am willing to tolerate are google-style text-only ads and static images.
Advertisers are going too far and I see freeloading as one way of protesting... and definitely a necessary thing for dial-ups.
really, how does /. know I am blocking the ads?
They can't, it's block on my machine.
It depends.
I used to think that Abblock worked by just redirecting anything filtered to the bit bucket. Then, I hit a site that gave me a redirect and told me to turn off Adblock. Now, they were actually serving up the ads locally so I don't know if the same detection can work with 3rd party ads. Maybe it has to do with Adblock blocking HTTP GET for filtered content or something... I don't know. But somehow they knew that their ads were not getting rendered (received?) by my browser.
But the point is that, yes, sometimes they can tell if you are blocking.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
I agree with the above post. I also don't block Google ads and for the same reasons. If print ads are as non-obtrusive I don't have a problem with them. I am in charge the web campaign for a company, and I've decided that Googles ads and Yahoo's similar targeted ads are the only ones worth paying for.
From the article:
He said if a similar tool could be produced for newspapers, it would not be accepted by consumers.
He is not comparing apples to apples. With a newspaper everything is the same color and stays in one place. I block the flashing "smash the monkey" advertisements, or the advertisements that lay over the content of the page (ie morningstar.com). As long as an ad doesn't interrupt my reading I don't mind it being there, and I might even look at it. A good example of annoying ads in print is the Readers Digest. The first thing I do when it arrives in the mail is rip out all the mail-in-cards and throw them away because they interfere with my reading. As far as I'm concerned it's exactly the same thing as online ad-blocking.
Unfortunately annoying your customers really does sell, or nobody would do it. But in my opinion it's a cheap trick used by simple minds. For example, people can use Tivo or their VCR to skip commercials. So, Coke and other companies pay to have their products right in the TV shows. They get their "impressions" and we are less annoyed.
Hopefully ad-blocking will bring more innovative and less annoying ads to the web. Everybody will benefit I think.