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Consumer Ad Blocking Doubles
Dotnaught writes to tell us about an InformationWeek article reporting that, according to a Forrester Research report, consumers are fed up with ads. From the article: "In the past two years, the number of consumers using pop-up blockers and spam filters has more than doubled.. More than half of all American households now report using these ad blocking technologies to block unwanted pitches... Today, 15% of consumers acknowledge using their digital video recorders to skip ads, more than three times as many as in 2004." The study would have been more meaningful if it hadn't conflated spam blocking with ad blocking.
Consumers have been fed up with ads evr since Cable TV was promising to make television "ad free". What consumer cares at all about ads? We don't, it's the sellers that care about ads not the buyers.
Say bad words about my book, in cold oatmeal, or I shall sue!
Consumers have always been fed up with ads - they just never had a way to avoid them before.
I dunno. For me, and I suspect many people, there's very little difference between spam and non-spam advertising.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
that someone actually _payed_ for the report. -- I am currently looking for fundings for a report on wether or not the percentage of people who think that water is wet increased last year or not. VISA, Mastercard virgin sacrifices accepted.
People also hate being shot!
52 52'23" W 47 32'07" N
``according to a Forrester Research report, consumers are fed up with ads.''
And I'm fed up with hearing about it and not knowing what it means. What _are_ these "ads" people are talking about?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
What I'd really be interested in is a study on how effective advertising is, and the trends over time, on several types of advertisements. I can't remember ever buying a product based on an advertisement. At the same time, I can recall many times when I've promised myself NOT to buy a product as a result of a terrible, or invasive/unwanted advertisement. As ads permeate our lives more and more, I imagine I'm not alone. Personally, when I'm looking for a product, I pointedly search for reviews on it, and descriptions of features. Generally I look at the company website and, if available, third-party ratings and tests. With the Internet coming into more and more prevalent use in our daily lives, perhaps the old paradigm of "push it till they are sick of it, and will remember it" should trend towards "give them a place to find it, and information on it, if they want it."
Sure comparing spam and ads is a little dumb (We are talking about Forrester here...), and skews any numbers, but I'm sure everyone has one of those A-holes in your town who is constantly screaming specials at you because he is liquidating his warehouse for the umpteenth time. If that ain't spam, I don't know what is.
-Offtopic-
On a related note, the guy in my town (Stereo City, PDX) is so obnoxious I vowed to punch him in the nose if I ever saw him. Turns out he needed a website and someone recommended me. I declined, because I just couldn't bring myself to help him. And I was afraid I might punch him in a meeting.
-/Offtopic-
It probably won't be long before some clever ad makers create a secondary level ad within an ad that seems static at normal speeds and becomes a more active/interesting animation as people fast forward with their DVRs.
A better quote from the article would have been:
"Broadband households have become even harder to reach: some 81% of those with high-speed Internet access employ pop-up blockers and spam filters."
It's not surprising, either. At one point, it was commonly recognized that computers belonged to the people that owned them, and that it was the responsibility of people writing software to make sure that the software was well-behaved and did what the user told the software to do-- except for deliberately malicious software. While I do not claim that all forms of advertising are malicious, it's becoming the case that websites using lots of pop-up or pop-under ads, or software like games using Massive's technology or other in-game ad-delivery mechanisms operate under the assumption that they are free to do things with the user's computer and consume networking resources to fetch and display content that the user didn't ask for and does not want.
I can tolerate ad-bars appearing on the right-hand side of a page, so long as most of the screen real-estate shows the actual content I want, but some sites do obnoxious and deceptive things like displaying an interstital ad first. My response to that is to copy the ad link into an email, and send a complaint off to both the webmaster of the site I was on, and the site holding the advertising, indicating that their ad was so annoying that I won't be returning to the offending site for at least one week, and that obviously they will be losing my eyeballs and ad impression revenue for that period of time.
It seems to have an effect, too. At least two of the newspapers I visit (the Boston Globe & the LA Times) have toyed with interstitial ads and have dropped them soon afterwards....
"The human race's favorite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them." -Celia Green
Movie theaters are just as guilty at pushing unsolicited ads onto the paying customers as cable TV providers, utilities such as gas/electrical/phone companies/ISPs etc.
You can't handle the truth.
Advertisers and networks are getting clever at sneaking ads past us DVR users. So far, I've seen:
/.er in the broadcast industry knows more?
1. Ads styled to resemble the program they interrupt: this is common during the Daily Show, especially during the last commercial break.
2. Experienced DVR users note that the blank-screen pause length between shows and commercials is generally longer than that between two commercials. I've observed other people responding both consciously and unconsciously to this, unpausing shows quickly during that period of blackness. Who doesn't like being precise with the remote and avoiding the post-commercial rewind? I've noticed that some networks, for the greater part of this past year, put a longer pause between the second-to-last and last commercial. Usually, some of the ad's audio is played before the FF function is rapidly restored; sometimes, people will just sit through the ad. The fact that I've only seen this with this particular timing (it wouldn't make sense to do this between two early commercials, because the viewer's brain isn't cued up to unpause the DVR) is what leads me to suspect it as a deliberate ploy; perhaps some
Anyone noticed any more of these little tricks? If I was an advertiser in a market with a high proportion of people likely to use DVR, I'd try a 15-second, unchanging, large-text ad with voice-over to at least propagate the brand and slogan for a few seconds of FF time.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Spam is another thing entirely. Some spam is advertisements, but when I look in my GMail spam folder half the crap I get doesn't make any sense at all. Looking at some of this, I don't even know what it's trying to tell me or advertise for.
Lumping advertisements (TV, Web, Radio, billboards, etc) with spam (e-mail) is silly. If you're blocking advertisements that come with a service you're using, you're affecting the income generated by the service your using. If you're blocking spam, you're avoiding completely senseless, unsolicited, unwanted junk that you have not done anything to receive.
The study would have been more meaningful if it hadn't conflated spam blocking with ad blocking.
Wow... I wonder whether there happens to be three times more DVRs now? Weren't these people just using the fast forward button on their VCR before?
And here I thought I was actually PAYING for cable. What WAS I thinking.
Oh -- not enough millions of dollars that way. I have to pay AND watch ads. I'm SOO sad for the Comcast &c CEOs.
I used to think that if I visited sites with advertising then I shouldn't interfere with the ads. After all I didn't have to look at them.
Then fancier moving ads came out (maybe some with bugs) and I found some used up most of my CPU cycles in firefox.
Eventually I had to install AdBlock+ so I could be sure that I could have 40 tabs open without cripling the browser.
Sure a fancy ad may only add a little overhead, but when you multiply that by 40 it adds up.
"The study would have been more meaningful if it hadn't conflated spam blocking with ad blocking."
Then why post this here?
The fact that the use of ad blocking software has doubled over the last few years really doesn't surprise me. In fact, as much as advertising has inundated the online world, I'm surprised that the use of blocking software hasn't grown faster than that. I've been using a combination of tools such as Adblock and Privoxy for years now, to the point that I'm pretty spoiled and can't imagine browsing any site "unprotected". Every so often I find myself at a public computer, say in a computer lab or library, and I can't imagine how people get anything done with all the obnoxious distractions from flashy animations to those floating windows that cover the small paragraph of meaningful text I'm trying to pick out of that sea of ads. Then again, I guess your average Joe User doesn't mind seeing all that advertising, or doesn't always know how to block it. That 81% mentioned in the article includes people who use spam filters (and probably their browsers' bulit-in popup blockers, too), so I imagine that the number of people who go farther to block ads on web pages is actually much lower.
It's not just online, either. Our society has become a culture saturated with advertising at every turn. You can hardly even use a gas pump or cook an egg anymore without marketers seeing another opportunity to make an "impression". Thankfully, there are some aspects of our lives where we can do something to help filter out some of that crap, and the internet is still one of them- at least until the marketers get creative and figure out new ways to bypass filtering software.
I think the original poster is wrong about this study losing meaning because it conflates adblocking with spam blocking. Both online ads and spam are unwelcome intrusions into our daily lives, and both are delivered via the internet. Both can be blocked with readily available technology and both are widely ignored by users, even when they get through the protection.
I think you're making the mistake of granting online ads some special significance because they were paid for by mainstream operations, but really, when it comes right down to it, Microsoft Dynamics are not that different from the guy selling penis enlargement pills. An stupid flash commercial for Blackberry has much in common with the spam touting FREE PRON.
I happily deny both of them space in my head.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Any ideas on how to stop this crap? I've so far written to those ValuPak people, all the credit buerus (that actually worked), but I still get so much garbage in my mailbox, and the ValuPaks keep coming. Is there any law like the "Do Not Call List" for snail mail. Its infuriating.
It isn't like people just get DVRs just to skip ads. And people don't download the Google toolbar just because it blocks popups (actually, I bet more do this than buy DVRs to skip ads--before switching to Opera, I used to use the Google toolbar to block popups, but I would not actually show the toolbar, so I was actually only using it for its popup blocking ability, not for its search features. But I bet the majority of users download it for the search function).
The article could more correctly say that "people are fed up with ads" if it were showing that people are going out of their way to block them. Instead they're showing that a lot of people downloaded the Google toolbar and discovered that it also blocks ads, and a lot of people bought DVRs so they could watch shows whenever they want, and discovered they can also fast forward through commercials.
A better measure of people's "fed-upness" with ads would be keeping track of the increase in use of products like ad-block in Firefox, or see if there's a major increase in the use of products that block ads that cost money (far fewer people would use such a product, but a dramatic increase in usership could likely be extrapolated to the general attitude of a population).
Advertising by its very nature is parasitic, especially in the modern age where anything has the potential to serve a marketing function.
In the last century, ads became increasingly ubiquitous and intrusive. Businesses struggled to guage how effective their advertising budgets were because there was simply no reliable way to track conversions.
But with the rise of the Internet, there finally came a medium that could be measured. A banner ad is successful if it has a 1% click through rate, and generally only 1% of those result in a sale (doesn't that sound pathetic?). A lot of times, a banner isn't even intended to get you to buy anything, but rather to entice the user to submit their personal info, which can then be sold to a third party. Depending on the site, such a lead can be worth $1 to $50 each, and can be resold as many times as the seller can find a buyer for their list (which then gets assembled into another saleable list, and so on, and so on). It's not about selling things to the user, it's about perpetuting the cycle of invasiveness.
With the ability to track comes the ability to block. I have an 18,000 line HOSTS file on my machine specifically for this purpose, but most people don't realize they have this abliity and pony up for the crapware that claims to block ads for them (but may or may not block the tracking cookies served with the ads). I laugh every time I see an Earthlink or AOL commercial that offers free crap blockers with their service. And everyone claims to have the best one. Anyone who is annoyed enough by something will take steps to end the annoyance. Apparently this sector of the population is growing fast. DUH.
People don't like ads, they know they are parasitic. People put up with ads that are benign and unobtrusive. If print magazines were capable of including animated ads, their circulation would take a hard hit, and the editors wouldn't understand why. "We have this cool new ad technology, people must want to see it!" No, we don't, we want to see your content without being distracted. This is what marketing people don't understand about the Web. Bright, flashing animated repetitive ads are actually taking away from the user experience of the site, regardless of whether that site would even exist without the ads.
The internet should be a lesson to all the ad pushers out there on how not to run their business. Instead, they don't see the effects of the ads for what they are and make them more obnoxious. It's a viscious cycle, and the marketing people seem to be immune to any "put yourself in the user's shoes" exercise. To them, advertising is a must have for everybody.
Minority Report came up in another story discussion recently. The scariest part of that premise isn't the Pre-Crime, it's the retina-scan-driven billboards everywhere. I hope before that point the public gets outraged and puts a limit on how much the corporations can saturate our existence.
FWIW, I used to work with the guy who came up with the X-10 camera ad campaign. The man was a consummate dork (literally could not comprehend anything except advertising) and was known as "King Dumb Shit" (or simply KDS) around the office.
What can you expect when ads are intrusive and frequently block themselves over using Javascript over the text you are trying to read.
I got so fed up after yet another wired blog was covered over by their own paid advertising I started to block them, if they would have be un-obtrusive (for example google who I think do a good job in balancing the ads to be there but not in your face!) I wouldnt have bothered.
Until companies like Wired stomp on this practice rather than encouraging it they are going to be seen as just as much as (well not quite this bad) a pariah as companies such as zango.
Darren
/. is very guilty of this. The last ad I saw was some MS video flash ad. (Thank god AdBlock freed me from that.)
/.ers have their own sites, like me, and reluctant to block ads, as they know first hand that they are what keeps the site running. But we also have enough class and respect of our users to not subject them to the insane things that they have tried to shove down our throats here. I'd be happy to view normal text-ads and even banners, but video? Show some respect.
/. the day they are not intrusive. Until then, I'm happy to not view them at all.
I'm sure a lot of
When you push your luck, you end up losing everything. I'll stop blocking ads on
I got fed up with ad's using up my hard earned bandwidth (highspeed cable is not enough as it is!) I just changed my host file to send all anoying ad sites to 127.0.0.1 ala Mike's Ad Blocking host file I found on google... (I use his because I got tired of editing my host file every time a new ad came up).
This cuts down on a lot of ads, even in things link MSN IM.
I too am disturbed with websites that produce too little content and too many ads, but there's a conundrum attached right next to it.
Most webbies of today are free of charge, whereas the visitor has the right to objectively decide whether he or she wants to read it for free or not. I feel that if I browse a site and return to it as well, I also need to give the author something in return. It's all about loyalty and morale. You get something for free and should therefore give something back.
Some can argue that there are too many ads on the sites they visit. If this is true, there is likely a good alternative to that site, too. What better way to show that you're displeased than stop visiting the site?
Full Tilt
Slashdot is partly ad-supported. Slashdot knows people hate ads (fuck Flash).
Look, it's no secret that a lot of people here block ads, including those on Slashdot. So to me it doesn't really make a lot of sense to rely on advertising for part of your income when you know damn well your readers hate it, and in a lot of instances actively block it.
Oh noes, Slashdot business model is dieing! I thought Slashdot was supposed to be ahead of the times.
I understand that ads bring in revenue and help keep sites alive but I'm not going to be subject to the filth that advertisers sometimes feel it necessary to use to get people to click to their website.
The lack of interesting content on TV is a related problem that is just as important. I, for once, just stopped watching TV altogether 7 years ago and haven't had any kind of service since. My decision was 70% motivated by luck of content I was interested in and 30% by annoyance of commercials.
People are fed up with ads, but making good ads is unpredictable and is likely more costly for advertisers; since the viewers aren't paying for it anyway, the advertisers don't care how annoying their ads are if they increase their profits. Now people can actually skip the ads via TiVo and its internet analogs. Advertisers will respond by either:
1) making better ads...oh, wait, they could have done this before, but it would cost more money and is hard to do consistently. Guess not.
2) integrating ads with content (sports events on TV have lots of "X scoreboard" and "Y events of the game") so that people can skip them only with difficulty - this works until the ads become annoying enough that people stop watching. Radio also uses the same announcers to deliver ad spots and the events/shows so that content and ads are hard to distinguish quickly, which works subject to the same caveats.
3) throwing money at Congress until it bans/neuters methods of avoiding ads. Nah, this would never happen.
I would have liked to think that if we were paying directly for programming, ads wouldn't exist, but their proliferation in user-paid media such as cable and video games suggests otherwise. Unless the viewers (and/or the customers of the advertised products) of content go away, the annoyance of ads is going to escalate. I don't think I'll be spending big bucks on a TV anytime soon.
I don't think advertisers, with their own heads so far up their own smelly asses, even consider that the consumer has a choice whether or not to watch advertisements. Instead, they treat us like we're bound and gagged with our eyes propped open. Then, they feed us complete bullshit with zero entertainment value at a volume level that is three times that of whatever show we were watching. With HDTV, it's even worse than before! How the fuck do they not have the volume problem fixed by now?
Not only have I been skipping shows automatically (with my Replay TV 4500), or fast-forwarding them (with my HDTV PVR from the cable company), I've also been hitting the mute button and getting up to walk around for 5-7 minutes during commercials when I'm watching live sports or don't have a PVR on the tv I'm using.. I hate TV commercials. I hate them with a passion. If I could, I'd pay for the shows I wanted to watch.. and the sporting events.
If a person has the Internet, he or she knows 100% of EVERYTHING in TV commercials already. There is no point for any smart person to watch TV commercials anymore. Hell.. the 1% of entertaining commercials get played over and over on the Internet anyway.. by people that actually want to see them!
Also, commercials have ZERO entertainment value. In fact, they're repulsive. For 99% of commercials, there is no humor, there is no attempt at being realistic (cars flying.. I mean come on!), there is no concern over the viewer's well-being. Commercials tell us to buy cars we cannot afford - to get 30 fucking thousand dollar cars as gifts even! They tell us we're depressed and need pills for $100/month. They tell us we need help breathing, sleeping, and even having sex! They tell us fast-food is healthy. They tell us processed food is healthy and wonderful to give our kids. They tell us not to smoke and to use condoms - stuff that the dumbest of idiots have already heard. They tell us about politicians... in only a negative or untruthful manner. They tell us to 'panic like hell' until we can watch the cliffhanger of a news hour about something that ends up being lame and overplayed. They tell us to buy diamonds for every occassion. It's raining.. BUY DIAMONDS YOU IDIOT!!!
Commercials represent the worst of mankind. If a person had to learn about humans simply through watching commercials, he or she would hate everything about us.
The entire advertising industry has fucked everything up. They have the consumer hating them so much that many consumers make it a point NOT to buy products from companies with horrible ad campaigns.
Who makes money? Well.. the advertisers. They make money off companies too outdated to make a good product who require quick mass-marketing to idiots to sell a product. And, the companies that actually make good products..
Let's take an example.. the IPOD. Did it take off because of the commercials or did it take off BEFORE the commercials? The answer is BEFORE. Smart people bought them, used them, liked them, and told other people about them. Only after they sell tons and make $tons, marketing assholes at Apple say 'hey.. let's throw money at advertising' and they make a bunch of lame commercials.. Then it sells more because it was already selling. And the marketers take credit.
There's a reason many of the best-selling money-making products aren't even shown in commercials.. they're just good products.
Time is too valuable a commodity now in our insanely fast-paced world. The consumer no longer has time to be repulsed by 30 second ad spot after ad spot. The consumer can turn his or her eyes and ears off now. Seriously.. we can.
Sadly, though, in a way we ARE forced to deal with them. We cannot simply 'buy' most shows and play them on our living-room TV's.. at least not yet. So, we skip them, mute them, or get up and shit during them.
BTW, Internet advertising is ALSO not the solution. Don't even think about acting like it is. The advertising money will simply GO AWAY to companies that know how to make something value-added. Advertising has been a waste for years now.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
show me an animated ad, or an ad in the body of the text im trying to read - its adblocked to hell. static banner ads at the top/bottom of articles or skyscrapers in the left/right borders are fine. And yes i do the same thing, blank out the whole site serving the ads.
Mind you, how many people who do block ads are happy enough to watch talk shows with 'stars' flogging their latest film or read papers with their 'independent' reviews?
The other day I noticed Family Guy was on TBS, a channel I don't normally watch, but I needed something to tide me over for 10 minutes. Anyway, during the 2 minutes I could stand watching it, they showed ad after ad DURING THE SHOW for other shows. First they had a little popup in the bottom right corner, then some large text scrolled by, then a larger popup taking the entire bottom half of the screen, then more scrolling text, ad nauseum. One after another. Why in the hell would anyone want to watch anything at all on that channel?
Does anyone know what % of money that cable/satellite TV providers charge subscribers goes back to content providers? From what I gather - very little but I failed to find any specific information so far. Anyway, I am thinking about the business model where content providers generate 100% of their income from the subscription fees. No ads at all. Or an option to pay and be rid of 100% of the ads. This of course would drastically change the foundation of broadcast industry and would most likely be blocked by largest advertisers. At this time it just seems that TV content is nothing but a filler between the commercials. Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around?
My pet peeve are ads that "grow" or "follow" you around to use real estate your browser has given to real content.
Anyone know of a way to constrain a flash animation to its original dimensions, or alternatively, have the browser "reserve" space for the maximum dimensions and move the content out of the way ahead of time?
Ditto anyone know how to keep "follow the mouse" ads out of areas that are used for other purposes?
I mean short of turning them off completely.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
These 'ad-skipping' technologies are in turn causing an increase in product placement.
there are too many ads. they are frequently stupid. they are repeated ad naseum. they take up too much of my time - almost no shows are worth watching if you can't skip the ads because it takes to long to watch them. they are full of false logic, half-truths, misrepresentations, and bad statistics. they encourage ignorance and uncritical thinking.
I am old enough to have watched 2001 in a movie theatre when it first came out. one of the most startling features of that movie its display of commercialism in one of the space stations. At the time (1968) this seemed preposterous. This was much more preposterous than HAL. Well, we still don't have HAL, but we've got the commercialism.
Having two DVR's, on from Dish and one from Sony for OTA HDTV, I time shift, as my tv time and theirs will never agree. Skipping commercials is recapturing time. I now record just about anything I'm interested in, watch it on my own schedule, and reliably zap every commmercial. (being able to freeze scenes from Star Trek : TOS in HD is just a bonus) Sorry Guys, but that's the way it is-and anyone who says differently is not being truthful.
It looks to me as though TFA conflates them, but without having access to the study itself I can't say whether the study itself does. I'd be inclined towards a default assumption that the people conducting the study aren't that dim. Whose confusion is this?
No, I generally take 2 minutes to tear out the annoying ones before I read the magazine.
I realized after I posted, however, that I should have also noted that I am only *really* bothered by annoying or super-frequent ads. Popup blockers and ad blockers were developed AFTER the audience was over-inundated with advertisement. If they had just kept things at a reasonable level, we'd still be watching the ads instead of blocking them. But they get more and more greedy and have to fit "just one more" ad in.
>Do you whine about advertising in the print magazines you purchase?
No, but then I don't have to read them either. I can flip by them at will and only read what I want. I subscribe to Vanity Fair, and it is really ad-heavy, but I don't have to read any of them. (I do 'cause there's some really nice eye candy there.)
Video media and radio make me wait through the ad for the content.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
People have always been fed up with ads, now there empowered to do something about it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Data referring to "TeeVee"
"That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year Two Thousand Forty."
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Especially the ones with sound.
Look, if I wanted such things I'd be asking for them.
So, instead, if they get annoying, I block them.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Especially when there is bittorrent to download the little bit of content that you do want to watch. I canceled my cable service* 2 years ago and my MythTV box turned into a downloader. I feel no guilt about downloading content that was otherwise broadcast. I was really only paying the cable company for delivery of content (not the content itself) and I would have MythTV'd the ads anyway... so what is the difference?
It is interesting how using MythTV actually got me watching LESS TV. I would have thought it woudl increase the amount of time spent watching content, but by the time you remove all the ads and distill the content down to just the stuff you're really interested in, there isn't much left. There's maybe 4 series that take all of 3 hours per week to watch. Lost, Heroes, Grey's Anatomy, and The Office. Oh, and Family Guy. 5 shows. 4 hours, tops.
-matthew
* If the cable company would actually let me select the few channels that I like and only charge me for those, I probably wouldn't have canceled my service.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
No, but then I don't have to read them either. I can flip by them at will and only read what I want. I subscribe to Vanity Fair, and it is really ad-heavy, but I don't have to read any of them. (I do 'cause there's some really nice eye candy there.)
Exactly. I too get Vanity Fair - and the only ads I tear out are most of the perfume ones (cause it stinks up my room with so many).
But most of the ads are quite informative, not too disruptive, and sometimes better than the rest of the magazine (especially some of the front fold-out ones.
If advertisers want to spawn ads when I visit a website - they need to stop doing all the noise, motion, and overly busy moving ads - those are the ones I block. I try to leave the ads working unless they get too annoying - then I kill them mercilessly.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I think it's largely because the adds are getting worse (by which I mean more intrusive). Newspaper adds... no problem, you can ignore them easily, and they are occasionally very helpful (I regularly buy thursdays age just for the computer adds/comparitive prices). Non-animated online... same deal. Most tv adds... annoying, but I can live with them. Some tv adds... loud, die frog die, where's the remote? Noisy online adds that scream when the mouse goes near them... blood beginning to boil. Popups... right, that's it, the adds must go, time to install an add/popup blocker.
See the problem? It's not (usually) the existence of adds which is the problem, it's just a question of relative annoyance factor.
Ads block YOU!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Which is why flash ads were developed. Its hard to just right click and hit "don't show images from this server anymore".
Ad-blocking doesn't do much good, if everytime you do it, they come up with a better way to show them.
Pop-up blockers begot the pop-under ad
image blockers begot flash ads
if we block flash ads I'm sure they'll just start randomly coming to people's homes and breaking their legs.
The same thing has happened to me. I don't have a TV at all. I use netflix to rent DVDs of TV shows that I want to watch. I cannot stand listening to radio excpet NPR and Pacifica (and NPR has started running advertisements as well! (Pacifica is annoying in it's own special ways)). If I am at someone elses home and they are watching TV I am usually very annoyed with the frequency, volume, and length of ads. I'll usually leave the room and talk to someone who isn't a slave to the the tube.
6 462.asp
I've made special effort to protect my 3 year old from persistant advertising. There is a growing consensus that advertising contributes to many social ills in children, including obesity, anorexia, alchohol consumption, early sex.
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20061204/106
Apparently, on average, children see 40,000 ads per year on TV alone! Now advertsising is common in schools. All those ads may be good for buisness but I'll do what I must to protect my boy from this mental poison.
-- QED
So you want me to view ads an potentially click on them to generate revenue for your site? It seems fair since I am receiving a service and you have to make money some how, but I have some demands.
1) They should not be annoying - Too often sites put annoying animated flash ads on their site (apparently slashdot included).
2) Find a demographic and target them - If im looking at reviews of digital cameras I might click an ad that goes to a site selling digital cameras.
3) Don't make a page that should be 1 page into 20 just so you can add more ads. (tomshardware, I'm talking to you)
4) Never EVER include sound. - Nothing I hate more than going to a site at 2:00AM and forgetting my speakers are still on high volume.
Until you follow these rules I won't turn off my adblock.
Are they not both advertisements customers don't wish to receive? And it's hard to argue website flash ads aren't as intrusive as advertising in my Inbox. As are the ads on TV shows that come over the speakers at twice the volume as the actual program.
Spam originated on Usenet, so to say that spam has to be sent solely via email is absurd.
If they wouldn't keep taking away from my content. When roughly a third of the timeslot of my TV shows is being given over to advertisements, it makes me mad. When internet ads are huge and intrusive, I block them so I can return the website to a more functional state. There are well-designed webistes out there whose ads I leave intact, such as Dinosaur Comics, and last.fm. IndieClick, one of the groups that advertises on those sites, have done a good job of keeping their ads small and unobtrusive. I've made it a point not to block anything of theirs. I think if website designers and advertisers worked together to make less intrusive and more appealing ads, I would leave them alone more often.
More and more my tolerance for advertising and my ability to screen them out has increased. I've had a PO box for years, where I don't get junk mail. I've been using a smart proxy-based ad blocker that works quite well on web sites for several years now. I get my news from the web and the ad blockers completely eliminate all ads, popup or otherwise. I haven't read a newspaper or magazine for years now. I don't watch commercial TV or even cable anymore, now that ads have taken over those as well. I could get a Tivo, but I prefer to buy used or discounted DVDs for my media watching. I rarely go to the movie theater-- and even there you can avoid the ads if you show up a minuite or two late. I shop for groceries at Trader Joes where they aren't looking to put in TV displays and place ads on everything, even the conveyor belt dividers. Everything else I shop for I do it online, targeted via Google. Google has ads but so low-key I don't really notice them. My email has a great bayesian-plus spam filter. I hardly ever see ads-- they so rarely make it through my screening filters that it is always a surprise if one does-- and usually such a surprise that I'm more focused on finding out how it did it than looking at what the darn thing is.
Madison Avenue can take a flying leap-- I slam the door on their foot. If you're funded by ad revenue, I say, simply-- GET A JOB, BUM! (Guess that applies to ./ as well)...
Someone should write a program that makes the pop-up ad server serve up so many ads that it crashes.
Like, something that requests the pop-up ad, then closes the window. Or, for other types of ads, requests the ads, then denies the content from the site. The program would do this so rapidly that they server would be bogged down in ad requests, without the ads actually making it to the other end - basically a DoS attack, except one might be able to argue that the ad service was being used for what it was created to do..... serve ads.
The best thing about this is that anyone with an ad service contract would definitely violate their ToS, especially Google's ad-serving policies, because of the sheer number of ad requests.
I'm not a programmer, so what I'm saying may probably will not make a whole bunch of sense to anyone who is a programmer, but just an idea i would like to see happen.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I'm surprised I'm the first one to apparently mention it, but have they tracked the progression of blockers to firefox/thunderbird adoption?
Maybe there's just more blockers because now, it's so easy?
It just shits me.
I've stopped watching tv, becuase of it. So I play more computer games, or read books, or draw or play music.
I've stopped listening to radio, and just cd's, or mp3s.
I dont go to the movies, I borrow dvd's off friends.
I've stopped reading the newspaper and get just surf the web sites that have news. And block those ads that support them.
I've put a no-junk mail sticker on my mail box.
And thankfully in the city of canberra, roadside advertising is banned.
The only way I find out about new products is through word of mouth from my friends, which I tend to observe how well it works for them for a while before I'll try it.
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
You mean you don't use FlashBlock?
My moms on 56k & one day she was asking why certain pages take so long to load. So I had her show me which pages, & they happened to be pages that were littered with ads. I stuck an ad blocker on there for her & now everything loads in about half the time. She uses it to block just about everything even the sites own images & banners (yes i know what page i clicked on, why do you have to waste bandwidth on a *picture* of *words* telling me?)
She couldnt be happier.
ssshhhh don't tell them. If they find out about it, its good-bye knee-caps for all.
I use the Firefox extensiont Flashblock. It's a lifesaver. You an allow flash or not. Since so many ads use flash it's all I need. I'd given up on other ad blocking stuff except for Firefox's pop up blocker. I can ignore the banner ads that are not flash.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
The answer to all this is to bypass the broadcasters altogether. They are completely pointless middlemen who are of no interest to the consumer. Their business is shoving adverts down our throats and they probably find it extremely annoying that they have to pay for content to entice us into watching. What consumers want is to watch good films and programs and those are made by the content providers. What we need is for the content providers to sell us their wares directly over the net. There's no reason it couldn't be done as cheaply as your Blockbuster postal DVD rental. You could pay $20 or whatever per month and that would give you the right to have X amount of films and TV Series episodes etc, on your machine at once. When you are finished with some content, it just gets deactivated and you can download something new.
It wouldn't matter that it was all DRM'd since you would be renting the content, rather than expecting to "own" anything. There would be little point in piracy since you would be able to watch what you want, when you want for a very reasonable monthly charge. There doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm from the content providers yet, but the public seem to be quite enthusiastic about downloading content. They have to realise that people want to watch things at their whim, not be at the mercy of a TV schedule or waiting for a DVD in the post that may not be available for weeks.
Certain site like CNN are making thier website "less functional" if you have your pop up blocker on. You can check for your self. Have your blocker on and try to browse the main video. I noticed this today on 3 different computers at three different locations. I read CNN like a junkie.
"Too bad that bureaucrats' hunger for power is never matched by greater quantities of wisdom or intelligence!!--Could it
As for TV, I'm just waiting until the last two or three of my favorite shows are available on the iTunes Store so I can cancel my DirecTV subscription.
We do sort of the same thing with Netflix. We're ready to drop HBO from our cable lineup. You might have an even better idea there. Download your shows and watch what you want, put an antenna up for local stations. DirecTV always manages to find a reason to raise our rates every year, Dish is worse.
But I'm wondering if the download shows won't start including ads before long? The more people doing something...anything...the more advertisers will pay to be included. Pretty soon it will become a new revenue stream and everyone will be doing it. Instead of a death spiral I might say it's more like an arms race between advertisers and consumers. We're willing to pay more for an ad free medium and they're willing to pay more to get on that medium. Ads aren't really the problem. 20 minutes of ads in a 60 minute program...that's the problem.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Edit your /etc/hosts (works on Mac or Linux), add:
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
and 90% of all annoying ads disappear! If you run across another site feeding annoying ads, just add a line redirecting it to 127.0.0.1.
I usually don't mind ads (I just ignore them), but when they started the large-pop-up-when-you-mouseover stuff, then they get perma-banned.
How would you like it if you needed to do laundry and some idiot left their clothes in the washer for several hours ?
Actually, I think popup blockers were created when people started abusing various "features" of javascript. Not only for advertising, but also just to be asses--such as cramming your system with tons of goatse.cx windows. A document being able to resize, move, take away menus, popup windows and such are practically asking for trojan horse javascript. Those "features" should never have been added. A HTML document should never be allowed to render or affect anything beyond the square space it has been given by the web browser.
In the vein of TV-execs that believe TV-ad skipping is pirating -- are you stealing your internet access? If you aren't watching your share of popups and spam, how will the internet support itself? I mean, blocking such things -- not watching them is a bit like pirating your internet content for free! Shame on us....*cough*
Ads slowing down site loading and PC at all and it doesnt matter how fast that PC is.
Ads are spying and using cookies.
I'm using firefox 2 & adblocker. I haven't seen an ad in months.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
and the sites all shut down and we go back to reading and writing books and using our own imagina-
WTF IS HOMELAND SECURITY DOING AT MY DOOR!!111!#2!!@@!33!!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
those numbers do not take into account of more people becoming aware of adblocking features that have made themselves more well known and easier to use. its no longer the case of me signing up my parents for the national no-call list. for instance, there is no mention of the increase in owners of "digital video recoders" (tivo?) that can skip those ads. the real intresting part of this article is the bit at the end where they have a marketer talking about the ramifications of this and the language that he/she uses.
This from a page that had 8 Ads When I visited (YMMV) with TV there is a marked increase in the number of ads per hour in 1982 a "1 hour" TV show (eg knight rider) ran 48 minutes of show and 12 minutes of ads in the nineties (eg stargate SG1) has 42 minutes of show and 18 minutes of Ads (i.e. 50% more) the same appears to have occurred on the web. I accept that advertising pays for content but too much advertising ruins the experience and actually causes avoidance and evetually failure of advertising. It would for TV execs and those in charge of Advertising to learn LESS IS MORE for them
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
Havn't seen one in years.
Could it be the advertisers' fault. I definitely think so!!! Most ads are incredibly intrusive, offensive, annoying, in-your-face, or advertise products of dubious value. Others such as the pop-ups on TBS, TNT, etc pop-up on the bottom of the screen and distract from the content. Others are so loud that they can be heard by the neighbors. Many of these same problems also occur on the Net. On the web, if an ad banner drops down in front of the content, takes too long to load, is annoyingly flashy, or otherwise in-your-face, I start changing my browser settings to restrict the website scripting as much as possible without affecting content. I am FED UP with all of the in your face tactics used to push uneeded crap. In fact, if I find an ad particularly annoying, I will NOT PURCHASE the product.
To quote the report:
Consumer ire, the report says, is driven by three factors: an excess of ads, the disruptive nature of ads, and the irrelevance of ads.
BINGO. I think they've hit the nail on the head there and it pretty much sums my feelings up as well. Especially the "excess of ads". I'm so used to tuning things out so I don't overload, and occasionally I catch myself doing it subconsciously. These days, blocking things out is necessary.
Not to mention ads that move an animate OVER THE CONTENT YOU ARE TRYING TO READ! Those are the worst, much more so than a simple pop up window.
I block all adverts and I have absolutely no compunction about it.
If I'm watching TV and it's not the BBC, and an advert break comes on, I invariably mute the sound or leave the room. I make a cup of tea, take a leak, roll a joint, clear out the cat's litter tray or something. If I'm recording the show at the same time as I'm watching it, I will even insert a chapter marker at the end of the break -- that way, pressing the next button skips straight to the next bit of programme.
I have configured a proxy server to block advertising servers on the internet. (One day, I might even put out a Feed so other people can update their own advert-blockers.) I also use highly aggressive spam-blocking. Almost nobody uses e-mail for legitimate purposes anymore anyway, so I don't care about losing the odd genuine message -- if it's important then they will find another way to get in touch with me.
I try not to buy products that are advertised. If the manufacturer is paying someone to tell everyone how good their stuff is, it can't be any good, can it? If they weren't spending money on advertising, they could afford to offer a better quality product for the same price. Get this? I AM NEVER GOING TO BUY ANY PRODUCT I SEE IN AN ADVERTISEMENT. You are wasting money if you try advertising to me.
If you depend on people watching your advert to earn money, I say screw you. Not my fault you invested in a broken business model, is it?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
In a number of cases the ads are hosted from the domain you're trying to browse in the following format
http://spoofdomain.com/adstuff/phpscript
Surely you can't block this from a hosts file entry without losing access to the domain?
I've been ambivalent about online ads for a while. There's a couple of exceptions that made me install adblock about three months ago. One was the windowless, popover ads that [1] try to conceal the close button as much as possible and [2] hover in the middle of the screen. I tend to browse in a smallish browser window towards the bottom of the screen and usually have to resize my window to be able to find the close control. Gaaah!
The second annoyance was the amount of adult ads on otherwise unobjectionable humour sites. While I don't have a problem with adult content, I'd rather not see my browser turned into a skillfully arranged butcher's window just to watch a half-minute flash animation I've been sent. Adblock again for the win.
The final benefit was the repetition of tracking cookies that spyware scanners tend to get overhysterical about. I'm not overly concerned about these and had tended to stick to a regular purge, however adblocking the domains serving these cookies has resulted in anti-spyware scans that come 100% clean - until a new domain starts up a tracker or, god forbid, something I need to be concerned about turns up.
Unfortunately this had an unintended consequence. I recently sent a link to a friend - a video or anim - that I'd viewed without incident. Whereas FF + Adblock gave a relatively quiet experience, it hit IE 6.02 with 17 exploits - not certain how many of these were just tracking cookies, but it's made me a bit more wary about sending links to content from sites without checking to see what's being blocked.
I'll tolerate ads. They pay the bills, and I appreciate having the content available without having to pay an additional fee. The ads on /. aren't bad, for example. But what drives me nuts are the Javascript ones with windows that float, move, or otherwise obscure the content beneath them. That's going too far. For those ones, I turn off Javascript (either manually or with Noscript) and reload the page. That kills them or forces the site to use a more reasonable advertising method.
I'm sorry, if advertisers are going to do the equivalent of waving a placard right in front of my face, then, yes, I'm going to tear it out of their hands and crush it.
How much would it cost to send the test card through the system to ALL sets?
Divide that number by the number of sets and you get a figure.
I would be astonished to find it works out to even $50 a YEAR (economies of scale and all that).
So what are you paying for? It used to be the $40 was paying for content. I.e. you paid the cableco, they paid for the content and pocketed some profit.
Then that wasn't enough money, so they sold time for adverts.
Those pop-ups are the equivalent of someone yanking the magazine or newspaper out of your hands so that they can yammer some inane and uninteresting babble at me. the fools who think that I will buy something that is advertised in that way are wasting their money. Oh sure I REMEMBER the product, and when I see it in the store I WON'T buy it. Movie tickets.com did that to me the other day and I immediately sent them a nasty email and did not buy tickets through them. Sure is nice to do that, but I will not be treated rudely just for a moment's time savings.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
I don't mind the presence of the ads, but more the ads themselves. Once in awhile one will come out that's truly entertaining, and I enjoy that. I can't stand the commercials that are insultingly stupid (the new DD commercials, and the "gellin' like magellan" series, to name a couple). A more frequent refresh of content would be nice too. Having to watch the same clip 4 times every half hour for weeks or months on end, anything will get annoying. I really don't mind *new* commercials... but it's usually just the same ones over and over and over.
"Piracy" is definitely a good way of avoiding rip offs.
And shoplifting is a good way to avoid overpaying for stuff. Sneaking into concerts is a good way of avoiding Ticketmaster's exorbitant administration fees.
What the hell is wrong with you?
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Firefox + Adblock = Bliss.
It's amazing how empty some websites are when you block the ads. Kind of sad really that they have nothing substantial to present instead.
The worst and the thing that really scares me are the ads that pop-up overtop of TV shows now, along the bottom or in the corner. I realize they are trying to beat the people who zap the commercials, but what's wrong with product placement? If done well, I don't mind it. But those damn cartoony ads or the 1-800-call-sam boxes in the corner OVER TOP the show are going too far. Makes me not want to watch the show anymore- or the network. Careful- they are going to get a national backlash if this keeps up. It's happened before.
It would be useful to have an ethernet device (not to be compared to a firewall) that allows blocking of IP addresses and URL's and the possibility to have RegExp support. Configuration changes should be possible via USB. Why I think that such a device is necessary ?
Windows changed hosts file support to ignore MS sites to be blocked recently
hosts file uses some CPU cycles and memory of the system
you can easily put it in front of your router to allow blocking of sites for many systems
No, but that might simply be because it's not true. The most popular sports in America are Football and NASCAR. Look it up. This month, as the 2006 season kicks off Feb. 11 at Daytona International Speedway, NASCAR racing is second only to the National Football League (NFL) in television ratings.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Ironically, some of the worst channels here for excessive commercials are the cable channels. Much as I love so much of their programming, BBC Canada is almost unwatchable live, so I record it and skip the ads. They do the right thing with some shows (e.g. Spooks), showing them uncut in an expanded time slot. Others they cut (e.g. Life on Mars), but I'm a regular customer of various U.K. DVD places and have a multi-system TV and multi-region DVD player.
In the U.K. the BBC is funded by license fees: in effect, a subscription scheme. I'd be happy to pay a reasonable subscription fee for my favourite channels (BBC Canada, Discovery) if they'd ditch the ads. The more ads they show, the more attractive it is to skip them...
...laura, who doesn't care if she never sees another Vonage ad again
Yeah. Today, Slashdot installed an intrusive Flash ad that covers content.
Allowing overlay in CSS was a big mistake.
addictinggames.com did that a couple days ago. This massive flash ad for the new zelda game. Not only did it pop up when moused over, it interfered with the flash games. If it was popped up (but under the game) the game would suddenly stop working. it also had sound, which could only be disabled when popped up, but popping it up often put it under the flash on the page which meant you couldn't get at the icon to turn off the sounds. That doesn't make me want to buy the product or visit the page.
I'd have no problem at all paying for each of my cable TV channels individually, on a per-month basis, for commercial-free entertainment. Of course, I'd probably only subscribe to five or six channels, but that's all I'd want or watch anyway. I have no interest in receiving 200 channels of television, I'm forced to get them in order to get a small number of channels I do want.
If customers refuse to watch commercials, and either start skipping them with DVRs or only watch downloaded TV that doesn't contain them in the first place, the networks will just have to figure out a business model that actually gives people a product they want, and gives it to them at a price they're willing to pay.
Just because it's 'the way it's done' now, doesn't mean that's the only way to do it. There's money to be made in entertainment; advertising isn't the only way to do it. When people get fed up with advertising, the entertainment companies who want to stay in business will find an alternative method to make money.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I do not watch TV anymore. I rarely go to the cinema. However, when I have turned the TV on I find the same thing as a few years ago when I stopped watching: The ads are blared at you at the highest volume. I can't stand this and so don't watch TV.
As for movies.. I really hate the situation where I am paying $15 to watch a movie.. and they ram 30 mins of advertising down your throat. Worse still, they show most of the good parts of the movies coming up.
For example..
A while back (Fantastic 4 I think was on) they showed the preview for Sky High. The kids learnt about the school. They were tested, and one kid failed. One kid was bullied but had no powers. He found that he did have powers and was just like his super father.
All of this in.. 3? 4? minutes. Wonderful. The entire movie condensed into a few minutes - and they do this for all the movies they can! I did not see Hellboy on the big screen due to this.
Oh well.
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