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Does Ad Blocking Affect Your Business?
yocto wonders: "From the individual's point of view we already know why you block adverts, but not from a business perspective. What is the impact on your business when your company's ads are blocked by using an ad blocker or a script blocker? How is your company's exposure or revenue affected by this? Is it still worth your effort to make use of online ads?"
Yes, it is still useful for business to utilise online advertising. Take AdWords for instance, you pay only for clicks through to your site. Users that block ads aren't likely to be the ones clicking the advertisements, and you don't pay for them. I'd say it doesn't affect business, it's probably better actually - you don't pay for visitors that aren't going to be interested.
Abandoning an online advertisement strategy because some people block them is like deciding against billboards because some people are blind.
I don't buy anything that's advertised, ever. Therefore, even if you do advertise that will just make me boycott you all the more.
If you want to sell products, make them good. Don't try to offer me mass-marketed overpriced crap.
I run a small (~500,000 PV/month) website with a free language trainer. The business model (which does not work) is based on ads, so I was concerned if people would filter out the ads. All of the pages on the site show either google ads or a single standard size non-flash banner, which is trivial to filter out. Some of the banners are in iframes and come from other sites, some come from our server. And as far as I can tell from the logs, the number of pageviews roughly equals the number of banner views. Now maybe all our users use ad blockers that actually load the banner, but do not display it, but I doubt it. Most of the users are from German speaking countries, so there may be a cultural difference, but I don't see any different behavior from the English speaking users either.
So I assume that most users are like me: I block pop-ups, because they annoy the hell out of me. If a site uses flash to aggressively, I turn on the flash blocker, but usually I do not because it is to often required for display or navigation and I'm to lazy to switch it on on demand. I don't mind most of the ads, since I realize they finance the content I'm watching.
Here at slashdot it always seems like almost everybody is blocking ads, but I think that the slashdot crowd is very untypical, ad blocking (apart from pop up blocking, which all browsers support directly) is not a mainstream thing.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
I would concur. The "I demand something for nothing crowd" is a very small percentage of the internet surfing population. Besides, what good would it do to show an ad to a cynic?
postmodernsideshow.com
Hate to put ideas in their heads but if companies really cared about making sure their ads are seen, I'm sure there is a way on the backend to check that a browser at least requests the ad from the server before delivering the content part of the page. I don't mean interstitials, I mean as the page is loading, the server checks that you've requested banner.gif before it gives you all the paragraphs in the article.
With css or javascript/DOM you can even position the text/ads however you like regardsless of the order they are downloaded.
Obviously, one could write a browser plug-in that faked a banner ad request, but you've at least taken away the download-speedup incentive part of the motivation for ad-blocking.
If ad blocking is ever "turned on" by default, I predict this balance would change dramatically. Advertisers would go out of their way to discover new ways to slide ads onto pages. I was actually surprised to see Firefox ship with a popup blocker that was enabled by default. I was not surprised to see Microsoft ship IE without a popup blocker enabled by default.
John
I work for an online advertising company so, yes.
I think most people who are savvy enough to block ads would not click an ad banner anyway. Today we have to worry about fake websites phishing for our account information, so if I'm interested enough in your product, I'm going to go to Google, do some research, and make sure I'm going directly to your website rather than click an ad.
The difference between spam and ads is the amount I can throw at you. I can send you 10,000 spam mails each day, but I cannot put 10,000 ads on a webpage. So there is a natural limit, preventing ads from becoming as large a problem as spam. Also there is more diversity between sites, if a site shows too many ads, I can simply go somewhere else. In theory I could simply change my email address, but this is very inconvenient, therefore I cannot avoid the spam without a spam filter, but the ads without an ad blocker.
Also spam is illegal almost everywhere, so it is not part of the regular business, and a lot of newsletter distributers would like to get rid of it and therefore support spam filtering. Web ads on the other hand are part of the regular legal business and you will not find much support for ad filtering from major sites or ISPs.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
I don't advertise other products. I want my own to be sold damnit, and thanks to creative word phrasing for search engines I can practically advertise cost-free!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
From: Laurence Canter (nike@indirect.com)
Subject: Green Card Lottery- Final One?
Newsgroups: alt.brother-jed, alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst
View: Complete Thread (4 articles) | Original Format
Date: 1994-04-12 00:40:42 PST
Green Card Lottery 1994 May Be The Last One!
THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED.
The Green Card Lottery is a completely legal program giving away a
certain annual allotment of Green Cards to persons born in certain
countries. The lottery program was scheduled to continue on a
permanent basis. However, recently, Senator Alan J Simpson
introduced a bill into the U. S. Congress which could end any future
lotteries. THE 1994 LOTTERY IS SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE
SOON, BUT IT MAY BE THE VERY LAST ONE.
PERSONS BORN IN MOST COUNTRIES QUALIFY, MANY FOR
FIRST TIME.
The only countries NOT qualifying are: Mexico; India; P.R. China;
Taiwan, Philippines, North Korea, Canada, United Kingdom (except
Northern Ireland), Jamaica, Domican Republic, El Salvador and
Vietnam.
Lottery registration will take place soon. 55,000 Green Cards will be
given to those who register correctly. NO JOB IS REQUIRED.
THERE IS A STRICT JUNE DEADLINE. THE TIME TO START IS
NOW!!
For FREE information via Email, send request to
cslaw@indirect.com
--
Canter & Siegel, Immigration Attorneys
3333 E Camelback Road, Ste 250, Phoenix AZ 85018 USA
cslaw@indirect.com telephone (602)661-3911 Fax (602) 451-7617
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There are still concerns and problems with ads on webpages.
They're vectors for adware and spyware exploiting vulnerabilities to install themselves, and it can happen even if the owners of a website are pretty diligent in trying to screen the ads for security. (Example.)
Too many rich media ads, or badly coded ones, on a webpage can use up way too much CPU power and affect the computer's performance.
In places where ISPs often have monthly bandwidth caps (I hear Australian surfers talk about those, for instance), downloading ads can feel like wasting bandwidth.
For the larger ad networks, ads are always trying to set cookies, and those cookies can be used to track you across many websites, and some people do not want to be tracked.
It's like asking how your business is affected by all the people the don't buy the newspapers in which you've placed an ad. "My business is plummeting, and it's all the fault of those people that don't want to buy my product!"
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Most Slashdotters are knowledgable enough to use ad-blockers with a browser like Firefox. Have you heard anything about CowboyNeal going broke?
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
I doubt ad blocking will ever be included and/or turned on by default, at least the type of ad blocking that Privoxy or Adblock/Adblock Plus do. (Opera and Firefox (and others) have "block images from here" capabilities, but they are rather simplistic and come with empty lists by default.) Advertising is legal and seen as a legitimate and accepted way of paying for "free" content, whereas spam is seen as invasive and offensive, and is currently illegal in most civilized places. Popups are a gray area, as they can be used for good and evil, which is why the popup blockers try to be smart about what they block and alert the user when they do.
Since when did wanting an unobstructed and unpolluted field of view equal demanding something for nothing?
(Hint: the answer is "since advertising companies decided to spin it that way, and the companies that use them decided to make the promotions department a revenue centre"...)
I don't want something for nothing. I'm quite happy to pay for my purchases, thank you. What I'm not prepared to do is pay for your promotions multiple times - at point of purchase, every time I visit your website, every time I visit Google, every time I visit some other random website, every time I check my email, every time I'm watching a TV show (I'll cut you some slack for actual ad breaks, but not the overlays/banners/split-screens during programs...), etc, etc.
And to all those who complain that places like
Listening to you whinge that people aren't playing fair when they block your ads is , unfortunately, my problem - because it's becoming increasingly hard to get away from...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
I can certainly get a lot more "business" done with Firefox, thanks to Adblock.
They already have. I was just using the "block unrequested popups" in mozilla, firefox, etc. Various slimy bastards figured out how to make it so I "requested" popup ads (like, they pop up after the cursor moves over the page or something.) So, now I adblock away any popups, and usually can determine what ad on the original page forced the popup and adblock that too. Ditto ads that make noise.
I do make it a point to keep on all other ads even if they're a bit flashey or the like though. If someone has "proper" non-popup and non-noise-making ads, (like slashdot for instance...) I do not block a single ad. Oh, and for sites like slashdot where the ads are topical enough to catch my eye, I even *gasp* click on 'em once in a while 8-).
It's relatively easy to work around ad-blocking plugins: simply make your ads be static images, never in flash or animated gifs, with slightly variable height and width, random names, in random paths, loading from the same server the main page is served, and from the exact same directory, never surrounding it by any specially-named frame, and never putting it into the exact same place inside a page. Doing these things would pretty much defeat Firefox's AdBlock addon as well as any size-based ad-blocker. They'll also work agains most, if not all, bayesian ad-blockers (if they exist, I'm not sure they do) if you don't forget to follow the exact same rules for all non-ad images in your web site.
If major ad-filled sites aren't following these trivial tricks, I'm pretty sure they don't see adblocking as a big problem. They probably think those 1% or 2% of geek visitors who block ads aren't statistically significant.
But if most people started using ad-blocked, be sure the above tricks would start being applied in a lot of places. And as a result ad-blocking development would become a field of research as much complicated, if not more, than spam blocking. It would reach a point where you would have to train a lot a filter for working in a given site, and deal with false positives and negative for a good amount of time, until that site you want ad-free was working as expected.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
The lottery spam is still alive and kicking even in banner form, like the university of liverpool and other online degree spam.
I entered this "lottery" with few spam-only accounts, just to monitor what kind of mail follows.
If I recall correctly, first response to the original "lottery" was request for nominal fee of $20 to cover the processing expenses
of mailing you your new green card.
Since the nominal fee wasn't paid instantly, they were kind enough to send 4-5 reminders that the fee is still unpaid.
After that, Mr D. Rivers-License has been offered wonderful opportunities to buy viagra and other subscription medicine and fake watches.
Shortly put, just another way to harvest working email addresses for selling them to other spammers.
Sadly, if someone is stupid enough to think they can win a green card from lottery, they actually might buy something from those other spammers aswell.
I wonder if they have separate database of people who actually pay the nominal fee which they sell with higher price.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Taking this from another perspective, allowing popups without question is a bug instead of a feature. As an example, open a webpage that recursivly opens popups - with Netscape 4.7. Best case scenario is that you have to take out a browser session (end task or kill -9) - worst case is Windows 95/98/ME running out of handles, taking out the system.
This can occurr because of bad programming, or over-zealous advertisers.
Do you remember the prank about the Good Times virus? If you don't, it relied on users making an incorrect assumption about computers auto-executing code. If you do... now you'll understand why browers can and should restrict popups.
P.S. Entering "type c:\con\con" will crash Windows 95/98. Loading a webpage that attempts to read that JPEG file on your hard drive will also cause a crash.
Make every page a Flash page with the ad built right into the flash page.
If you can make a dynamic content Flash page, there'd be no escaping it.
Also, cut&paste is impossible, too.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I'm not pro-ad, but I figure that more hackers will see this and start work on a pre-emptive solution to this potential problem.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Well, you can actually "win" a green card from a lottery, the US government holds one every year. And it's about to start for this year.
/dev/null. Since, after all, how do you want to check whether those ripoffs actually enter you?
'though, entering it is free, no charges attached, and nobody can increase your chances by even a hair. Actually, my guess would be that your chances are better if you fill out the form yourself, that way you can be sure to actually participate and not end up in
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"I'd say it doesn't affect business, it's probably better actually - you don't pay for visitors that aren't going to be interested."
Since ad blocking software isn't that discerning. One can't say that they're not interested in what one is offering. Only that one is not interested in ads from a given url. This is a similiar problem to what software like nannywatch face. What is acceptable and what isn't and getting it right 100% of the time.
All those content providers who provide the content you want an unpolluted view of provide the content in exchange for having your eyes on those ads. If you want to take the content and not the ads, then you're getting 'something' (content) for 'nothing' (nothing).
Personally, I'm inclined to agree. Banner ads are a shitty business model, and 'commerical breaks' are worse.
I'm waiting for the content makers to start brokering their own ads and putting their content up for download on their website instead of hurling it at TV networks who proceed to butcher it. You download the latest episode of Star Trek: The Search for More Money, complete with a few technology ads at the start.
Yes, it's still ad driven. But it's less intrusive, and the choices available are: Free and Ad driven, or Not Free.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
"I don't want something for nothing. I'm quite happy to pay for my purchases, thank you."
/. wouldn't survive without advertising : well, too bad. You want a website that people will visit? Be prepared to pay for it. You wanted it, you made it, you pay for it. How you pay for it is not my problem."
Is that why BugMeNot is so unpopular on slashdot? Every NYT article is GUARENTEED to have a BugMeNot link posted.
"And to all those who complain that places like
Good. Then you have no problem with the good things in life disappearing then? Like you said, "it's not YOUR problem"...until you want something from others.
"Listening to you whinge that people aren't playing fair when they block your ads is , unfortunately, my problem - because it's becoming increasingly hard to get away from..."
Cause and effect. How do you think "slippery slopes" get their start?
I kinda like the banner-sized black space at the top of slashdot. I'd be rather irritated if they put banners there.
For me not getting annoying popups actually increases the chances that I purchase a product. I will generally go out of my way to find a non annoying competitor when im shopping.
Sounds like a win, win situation to me.
See no ads==see no content.
See ads==see content.
The only one's who lose out are those who want "see no ads==see content" and I'm certain a BugMeNot-like solution will be made.
If enough people tivo their way through commercials, can we kill off the current crop of drivel on tv?*
As for the NYT articles, some people DON'T use bugmenot -- we actually PAY for the CONTENT WE WANT. Which is the whole point. The information is valuable enough to us that we're willing to pay to have it. We just want to pay with cash instead of paying by putting up with advertisements.
*I know, doesn't work that way, yada yada yada don't bother correcting it, its humor for those of you who didn't notice
...I'll cut you some slack for actual ad breaks...
Apply directly to the forehead!
This has been a paid advertisement from all the world's farmers.
You should be able to tweak a setting inside the xpi, from what I remember its just a package of files, and in there there is a config file that contains the compatible versions. Usually what happens with a new version of the browser is that the extensions are technically compatible, but don't know it. Now I don't know if that's the case with AdBlock and FF2, but do a quick google search on the topic. For each recent revision of FF there have been tools available that "make extensions compatible for FF**" It doesn't actually do anything other than make the config tweak, and if it works, then the extension is compatible, if FF has changed too much, then it bugs out.
Good Luck.
ps. try this at your own risk, it seems to me that ad-block is pretty embedded in FF so the version change might actually be a problem.
Gravity Sucks
Why do people feel it should be against the law to make a living. Could Slashdot exist without the ad's? No it couldn't. By blocking ads you are making it harder for people to make a living doing something they have worked hard at.
I don't mind most of the ads, since I realize they finance the content I'm watching.
Ad's cost, they pay for nothing.
Ad's just mean you're paying twice over, once in time/attention to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Personally, if I had my way I'd make it illegal, or at least tax, any advertising "supported" service that didn't offer a realistic pay alternative, signalling the cost of the service to the market rather than hiding it.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Well if you want it I think you should pay for it. Why should anyone else?
Quite a few webpages are so full of ads that they drown each other out, becoming nothing but incomprehensible mass of color and motion. 100 or 10,000, who can tell the difference ? 10,000 blinking ads in a webpage could propably even pass for modern art, especially if the HTML is shitty enough that they partially or completely overlay one another and/or the actual text of the page...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
HI,
I just have a really large host file. That has the benefit of stripping out the trackers and counters aswell.
I do get the occasional ad which is served from the server I'm looking at, but I don't mind that as much since these are generally less obtrusive/objectionable
To my mind, if someone has gone to the trouble to block adverts (and trouble it is - no browser does so by default), it implies that they have no interest whatsoever in them.
It therefore follows that they probably have even less interest in buying a specific product on the strength of its advert. So what's the point in even chasing such people?
"I don't want something for nothing. I'm quite happy to pay for my purchases, thank you."
Is that why BugMeNot is so unpopular on slashdot? Every NYT article is GUARENTEED to have a BugMeNot link posted.
Uh, BugMeNot only provides login details for free websites. If they find any logins for paid accounts, they remove them.
Hint: the NYT does not charge for its articles. It merely demands personal information.
I have no objection to paying for things I buy. I do not see how not wanting to give (usually fake) personal details to a billion different websites counts as getting something for nothing. If they want me to pay, all they have to do is ask for money.
Sorry to threadjack, but obviously everyone is saying that eyeballs lost to blockers is no loss since they weren't going to be buyers anyway (usually).
Corollary to that are the "legal" but borderline abusive telemarketing practices like many sales-shrouded-as-surveys, political, tenuous "existing relationships", etc. Speaking USian here, if I'm on the national DNC list, and you think you can cold call me anyways because the law says you can, you're gonna get a *&^*&^% earful from me before I slam the phone back down.
Our business wouldn't be dumb enough to base its revenue stream on whether consumers who might not want to see our ads could block them.
Ads now take up so much screen real estate and are meant to annoy users by blinking and being animated, etc. Eventually, I just decided that ads irritated me to the point of installing an ad blocker. If they would have stayed unanimated or just slightly animated, I wouldn't have bothered. But these ads just got way too irritating.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Smart of you to use non-Flash ads. For one thing, I agree that they're more likely to be annoying and therefore blocked. For another thing, you can't right-click on them. If I see an ad for something that interests me, I right-click and open it in a new tab (or, if I'm stuck using IE for whatever reason, a new window) so I can go and check out the page the ad linked to without leaving the page I'm currently on.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
We haven't measured the effect of ad-blocking yet on our site, but it may not be as simple. If ad-blocking is turned on by default or by almost default (e.g. a "security" software asks the user if he doesn't want to see ads during setup) then ad-blocking can indeed cause problems. For example we knew about a custom made software designed specifically for our site (because the usual ad-blockers don't work here) spreading in our user community. Btw. paying subscribers don't get ads, and it is very cheap, but very few people subscribe even from those who spend an hour every day here. It seems that the ad-blocking people are the ones who don't want ads but don't like to pay either.
See, what many people are going to the trouble of setting up adblock for is it to block the ads that annoy them. Just like commercials, some ads can be useful, or at least amusing (heck, I tend to dislike most commercials, but I *collect* the funny ones)
For most like myself, we don't want to see "punch the money and win a **free Xbox-360 (**after subscribing to our paid services)" or ads for feminine hygeine products (when one is male) etc.
Same to spam. I subscribe to a few tech sites, because I want their ads (most isn't all that good, but every now and then I see something nifty I wouldn't have otherwise noticed). Plenty of other sites send me spam for sex pills, lame porn, or other things that I couldn't even decipher if I wanted the product. Even if I find a product that's interesting I won't buy it from the spammers because I know they've sent it to 1,000,001 other people who aren't interest in said tech-product.
Advertising doesn't necessarily suck. Intrusive, untargetted, or massive advertising does, and that's why many people block flash. If ads were all for things like $25 off a hard drive just as yours was about to crash, or some other product when you were actually looking for it, then perhaps people would consider blocking less. The problem is that it's really damn hard (and costly) to target advertising properly and non-intrusively to an individual, so most go with the cheap route of flashing gifs, boxing monkeys, or CI4L1S ads in the browser/inbox/etc of a gazillion people in hope of a fractional amount hitting paydirt.