Slashdot Mirror
Livejournal Bans Ad-Blocking Software
Anonymous Emo writes "The community/blogging site LiveJournal recently introduced ads on some pages for free users. More interestingly, they also added a new restriction to their TOS (XVI 17 b.) banning users from using or providing ad-blocking software. The new TOS also permits them to immediately terminate the account of anyone they catch doing this."
Well livejournal does need to pay for their bandwidth and running costs right?
With ad blockers getting more and more prevalent and sometimes getting installed by default with some firewall software, it might get problematic for websites depending on ad revenue.
Although I guess peopl installing ad blockers on their own, probably would just ignore the ads anyway.
It is clear one thing this rule is aimed at is people changing their journal to block the ads on livejournal. This is perfectly reasonable and even slashdot doesn't let you foil their ads by posting cleverly formated comments on a story (not technically possible here I presume).
What is less clear is if this is intended to apply to people VIEWING livejournal content. After all you aren't even really acting as a livejournal user when you do this you are just reading someone's blog.
I think we just need to wait and see if this actually amounts to any changes or is just overbroad legal wording to cover their ass in unforseen circumstances. Remember there are all sorts of crazy conditions in some EULAs/TOS that don't necessarily amount to anything.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Good job, Slashdot, with your bullshit disinformative article blurb. Let's go over this like intelligent human beings and show why it's a non-issue:
Livejournal just recently added opt-in ads for users that would let them have pretty much all of the benefits of a paid user for the cost of having ads on their journals. After you opt-in to ads you can opt-out at any time and return to your ad-free cost-free journal. Free users viewing another free user's page, their own friends page, or a paid user's page will see no ads but they will see ads when viewing the journal page of someone who's opted for ads. Paid users will see no ads at all. Even so, all I've seen of these ads so far are Google ads. This is article is total FUD and should be tagged as such.
People who block ads need to be prepared for subscription fees. Any content provider that relies on advertising for revenue will have to resort to subscriptions if viewers block or skip over their ads. In my opinion, if you choose to block ads, that is your choice. It's your hardware and you should be able to decide what your computer downloads and displays. But once you've made the choice to block ads, don't complain when you have to fork up a couple bucks a month for everything you once got for free.
you don't have to download and terminate the add :)
...
/banner/foo.gif query, but you just don't read the socket after that, you close it. this way there's no way for the server to tell if your connection just broke or you blocked the ad.
well at least kindof
you make the GET
livejournal people, please try to understand that this will never ever work.
if they make a more complicated system on flash banners and javascript for checking if the user really got it, you can display the banner offscreen somewhere, so it won't be annoying you in the top of the page.
worthless effort from the ad people. perhaps they should make banners worth to look at instead.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Some think it's funny, but you know what? The main reason why I use adblocking software is the adservers are f***ing slow! The whole site hangs while the browser waits for the servers to get around to responding to the request.
If they want to make sure we watch the adds then dump them in the image dir ON THEIR OWN SERVERS! that way everything gets same speed and I wouldn't care, my brain filters out all the ads anyways.
wa-la
I think you mean: voilà, but yes. There you go.