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The Morality of Web Advertisement Blocking
An anonymous reader writes "There has been some recent coverage of the over-hyped boycott of Firefox, in response to the rising popularity of the Adblock Plus Firefox extension. A recent editorial on CNET looks into the issue, and explores the moral and legal issues involved in client-side web advertisement blocking. Whereas TiVo users freeload on the relatively fixed broadcasting costs paid by TV networks, users of web ad-blocking technology are actively denying website owners revenue that would otherwise go to pay for the bandwidth costs of serving up those web pages. If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft? Is this right? "
If things weren't so horribly intrusive and capable of tracking a user's entire internet experience, for the sole purpose of selling you stuff, people wouldn't bitch.
I'd like to live in a fantasy world where I'm simply entitled by default to ad revenue, and I only have to deal with insidious "users of web ad-blocking technology" who are "actively denying" me my solid gold razor scooter. Fortunately for users, in the real world, a webmaster has to earn ad revenue by finding content that users want and ads they are willing to accept -- not by taking it for granted that they will just gaze longingly into the CRT clicking on everything that swirls.
For a long time, advertisers were able to support a huge number of frivolous web sites, partly because they could bombard the user with page after page of obnoxious flashing garbage for which no technical countermeasures existed. The collapse of the dot-com bubble eliminated the most unviable popup-pushers, and the rest are beginning to get the message. Popup blockers are normal mainstream software, and Google has had significant success selling all-text advertisements.
The website owners seem to think that we've pushed back hard enough, and should just deal with the sea of repellant Flash banners they want to drown us in. I guess those website owners are wrong, because clearly there are plenty of people who are not willing to tolerate the barrage of useless ads. We'll find a balance eventually, somewhere in between no ads at all and the websites whose masters believe they are entitled to a tithe every time their server sends a 200 status.
What's next step? Forcing people to actually look at the adds? Or press at it? Or are you a thief if you don't buy a product of an advertiser of a web page you visit?
There's no promise when I visit a site I will download what you offer. Images, CSS, Javascript, Flash, etc are all OPTIONAL. If I choose to save bandwidth by not downloading them, there is nothing morally wrong with that choice.
Hmm... Where have I heard about a site actively blocking users who hit it too many times in a given period?
If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft?
No more theft than it would be if you were viewing web content with a browser that couldn't physically render the content. What if everyone used Lynx, for example?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
But is there a moral difference between not downloading the ad vs. not seeing the ad? For example, I use my userContent.css file to not display advertisements in older versions of Mozilla (I like the full suite of apps darn it!). *My* bandwidth is still used to get the file, *their* webserver still logs a request for /advert.php?foo.... but I never see the ad. As long as the request for the advert is made and it is sent, does it matter if someone sees it? Of course, if they don't see it they can't click it, but still...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Those poor innocent spammers need to pay (somewhere, at some level, be it money for bandwidth or time to write the virus..) to send you those viagra ads .. if we block those messages, and never see them, is it theft of some kind from the spammers or the viagra company?
I fail to see how using Firefox to ignore the ad banners and such is morally any different than throwing out the advertising supplements to the newspaper without glancing at the ads therein.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
Well I guess better make my reservation for a nice room in hell since I'm so immoral. Because I run AdBlock Plus and I use it extensively. Not about to stop using it either. I pay for the bandwidth to download pages when I surf so I get to choose what gets downloaded and what doesn't.
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, For you are crunchy and go well with ketchup.
If the website owner feels it is necessary to use ads to support the cost of being on the internet, then the least they can do is avoid the flash "Bonk the _____ and get a ______" ads. If they aren't willing to do that then whether they like it or not I'm blocking their ads.
I go to websites primarily for content, and if thats disrupted by advertisement then I'm not getting what I went there for.
Going to the bathroom during TV commercials is theft!
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
No, it is not theft. I ask a server for a page and it gives it to me. I control which parts of the page will load and which parts won't. If websites don't like it, then they need to find a better business model.
No. Did you honestly expect any other answer, especially from the Slashdot crowd?
What ads?
I'm using their bits, eh? Well, they're using my CPU with all their annoying flash ads.
As soon as people learn that annoying (and often intrusive) Flash ads aren't appreciated, then there won't be a major reason for adblock.
IIRC, one of the joys of FOSS is that the community creates modifications (or, in this case, extensions). Why aren't people talking about boycotting the maker of the extension rather than Firefox themselves? I don't think there's any blame to be placed here, but if there is, at least place blame where blame is due...
When advertisers stop thinking me as "a consumer who needs to be trained to consume more" - I'll start giving a damn about what they have to say.
That they are providing you all of the bits, including the advertising ones. It is no more immoral to refuse to display them than it would be to simply cover them up with little bits of paper.
More importantly, this brings up a nastily annoying bug of mine:
Morality is simply motivation based on a sense of right or wrong.
Something is moral, therefore, if you do it believe it to be right, and immoral if you do it believe it to be wrong. Generally, therefore, people do not participate in immoral acts.
I am quite certain that most (>90%) if not all of the population who performs ad-blocking, therefore, considers it quite moral.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
"Our revenue model is broken, and exploiting said brokenness should be illegal."
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
Morally dubious? Not really. It's not like you have a contract with the person serving up the web page in the vast majority of cases. The standard non-fee service model is "I present you information, my advertisers pay for that presentation", but the web page visitor is a guest, and the payment arrangement exists independently of anything the visitor has agreed to. Until there is an explicit arrangement that the guest agrees to, it's a bad assumption on the presenter's part to assume that the guest is going to be equally interested in the advertising.
As far as I understand it, the pay-per-view advertising model has gone the way of the dodo, and they're all pay-per-click now. Telling me I have to let the ads through on a site, when I have zero intention of ever clicking on them, is pointless. In fact, since I'm never going to click on them, by not displaying them, I'm saving the advertiser bandwidth.
Liberty in your lifetime
I would say no - there is no obligation on the part of any viewer to view ads - print, web, TV or whatever. Just as you are fee to discard, cut out or mark over any ads in a magazine (or have someone do that to you copy before you read it) you can block ads from web pages.
If that becomes widespread - several things will happen:
1. Websites will block certain browsers (can they tell if FF spoofs itself as IE?) and lose the corresponding web traffic; getting less revenue from advertisers
2. They won't block ads but advertisers will be willing to pay less since they will assume x% of their ads are blocked and adjust their payments accordingly.
Either way websites will get less money - a logical market response.
Companies will also find new ways to deliver ads - and those that do so in a way that results in more viewer ship will make money.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
...that when we watch TV, we expect commercials. We think "public TV" is a novelty, so to speak. Same goes for radio. The same is even true for newspapers and magazines--which we even pay a subscription fee to read.
:)
When we browse the web, however, commercials are an intrusion. We expect web sites to be free, and we think it's a violation if we see advertisements.
Why is this?
My guess is it's just a difference in the culture the different technologies grew out of. Traditional "mass media" grew out of commercial interests, the Internet grew out of the educational industries. I could be seeing things far too narrowly, though
...what gives them the right to use my bandwidth to advertise to me? I whitelist sites that I visit often, and find useful - they deserve my revenue. the others? I surely don't care.
I rarely read ads in the newspaper, and throw away the glossy Sunday inserts. Am I stealing advertising revenue from the newspaper publisher?
If the building designer has to pay for utilities, such as air conditioning, each time you enter their building without reading their affiliated advertisement brochures, are you engaged in theft?
If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft?
In order for me to view their banner ads, my browser must actively request the data for that banner in a separate transaction from the one used to get the rest of the contents of the page. I see no reason for me, as the computer's owner and operator, not to forbid the browser from doing so.
As a good citizen of the internet, I think it a good thing that I don't clog the tubes with advertising bandwidth which I do not care to see.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
and it's why I don't use AdBlock...
But people are going to be paid to write good articles about products, instead of advertising. Your beloved Engadgets and Gizmodos will write articles saying "THIS THING IS AWESOME", paid for by the manufacturer. They won't be making any ground with traditional advertising since we are blocking it all. Tivo removes the ads as well.
So you are going to have to make a choice... do you want simple ads on the side that accompany your article or TV show, or ones that are embedded into them, and influence them? You can't have it both ways, and at some point marketing/ad companies will realize they are losing money because of Firefox and try alternative methods of syndicating their content. Probably at our expense.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
No. If you do not get the reaction you expected from me, then you have simply lost that portion of your investment. I have not stolen anything from you.
Next up on Slashdot, if she won't blow you after you buy her a drink, is she guilty of "theft of resources"?
That's the question they need to be asking themselves. We felt the need to use software like adblock because bandwidth-intensive and site-obscuring ads began to dominate the scene. They became so desperate for our attention that they resorted to noisy flash animations that actively get between web users and the sites they want to view. Of COURSE we're going to try to block ads after that...it's like having a commercial playing DURING the big game.
Site owners have every right to deny Firefox users access to their sites on the basis of lost ad revenue. It's their server, it's their bandwidth, and it's their choice. But I'd suggest a better solution: establish a list of sites that do not host those ads that are a part of the problem, and work with the adblock staff to not block them by default.
Acceptable ads: banners, sidebars, and inserts that always stay within their defined borders, do not flash or otherwise use animation to overtly draw attention to themselves, do not use rollovers for more than highlighting, and do not play audio without being clicked. Basically an image or set of images that won't chew up large amounts of bandwidth and won't interfere with the operation of the site.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Ads more and more are like malware than a passive banner you might decide to click. If there were an ad company out there that vetted the ads they serve to ensure they weren't impacting performance and weren't unusually annoying, I would be perfectly willing to install a subscription that did not block those ads.
So....point here is maybe we can come to an agreement, a comprimise. Websites could choose to go with the responsible ad server, and fewer people would block there ads.
It would be illegal if the website had a EULA that forbid me from blocking ads, that I explicitly agreed to. In that case I would be in breach of contract.
However, I have never entered to any such agreement, so I have no remorse or legal concern for blocking flash or anything else that I don't want my browser to display.
Next thing you know, some company will be whining because someone with poor eyesight has their font size cranked way up, which pushes content down the page, interfering with the company's high-dollar advertising spot that used to be visible without scrolling.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I'm not so sure it is theft.
Think of museums or state parks. You place yourself in a posistion that your doors are open for all to come in. Some charge admissions for enterance while other's do not. Maybe that park of museum decides that their method of paying for the services they provide is to put billboards up all around. Does that mean that if I enjoy the freedom of eating lunch under a shade tree in the park or I decide to walk through your "free" museum and look at all the paintings, that I also have to be forced to look at the billboard you placed there?
If you want to use that method of income then so be it, but don't expect me to look. There are other methods. You could charge a fee for access to your site. You could ask for donations. You can do all sorts of things.
Self proclaimed wannabe geek. You know how it is. Most of us who read this stuff probably fit in that category.
If you want me to view your advertisement it better not.
1. Have sound. If it does your so forever block from my browser and wallet its not even funny
2. Overlay what I am reading. Having to click your ad away from the article text means I know exactly who I am never buying from.
3. Pop a window, over or under, its the same, your gone.
4. Any ad which causes my HD to spin up to load the damn support required for it, aka Flash and JAVA. If it pauses my experience it ends your chances.
5. Heaven forbid you dare ask me to download something.
You want might business. Then target those pages with simple and to the point banners and block ads. Do not animate my webpage. Put in bold letters why I should even pay attention to you. If you animate, make noise, or otherwise disturb my surfing you are intruding into my life and don't have that right
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Bah, that's as bad as calling copyright infringement theft.
Are we going to start getting take down notices from ad agencies now too due to this twisted logic?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
When I transfer a + c bytes, that's OK. When I transfer only c bytes, I'm stealing. So in this case, it's stealing when I take less than normal?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
There is no such thing as a guaranteed business model. Just because it would be convenient for the world to work a certain way, or because it has worked that way in the past, does not mean that it will continue to work that way.
These businesses (and many others) have been built on the assumption that in return for content, consumers are willing to be exposed to advertising. If that assumption proves to be false, then they are going to either have to find a new business model, or else convince the consumers that they should watch the adds. If the business is build on people looking at advertisements, and the consumers are refusing to look at advertisements, there is a basic disconnect there that does not bode well.
The other side is that if consumers as a whole refuse to support add supported business, we are going to have to pay in some other way. Figuring out the balance of this struggle isn't just important for websites. It is the same disconnect that we are seeing right now in television.
Yes, it's exactly right to block ads if you like.
No one has to read someone else's ads.
It's obvious that some television ads are being made much more interesting and clever to combat the tivos. They have to MAKE you WANT TO WATCH THE ADS.
They have been succesfull. I watch more ads now than I did 2 years ago.
Largely gone are the brief playlets and illustrated lectures on the purchase of consumer goods.
If web ads were more interesting and less obnoxious perhaps they would be more successful.
The worst:
Intellitext popup ads.
Catch the monkey animated ads
Those ridiculous floating ads that sit in front of the site and scroll with you.
I put those in adblock right away!
.
The real theft is the advertisers who take ***MY*** bandwidth, i.e. the one I pay for myself with my ***OWN*** money to deliver advertisements I do not watch in any case.
You know, before TiVo people used to skip ads by (1) going to the bathroom, (2) getting a snack, (3) changing the channel, or (4) talking. Does that make OTA tv-watchers freeloaders too?
This attitude is irritating. Over the air content is provided for free. There is nothing that says "to watch this TV show you must watch the commercials." Same with radio. Radio content is provided for free. There is no implied contract that I must listen to advertisements to enjoy the content.
It is my choice whether to watch/listen to the ads or not. This isn't a question of morality at all. It's also my choice whether I buy a product or not. Does not buying mean I'm being immoral?
If a car dealer says "If you don't buy this car, I'll starve and you'll kill my family," would you still buy the car?
What about my bandwidth? They're trying to say I'm OBLIGATED to take everything on their page, not just the parts I'm requesting. I can assure you that I'm requesting their content, not the ads. They're forcing unnecessary bandwidth requirements (and slow load times) upon me by their advertising.
With a pipe, there ARE two ends to it you know.
With pop-ups and annoying flash ads that talk at you or play sound when I'm listening to music, I don't see a giant problem with blocking these. I also hate the stupid ads that use javascript to float over the content I'm trying to read. Lastly the hyperlink-every-other-word has to go too. I don't mind banner ads, text ads, ads between "the jump," or ads along the sides a la fark.
We're told the old line "we use ads to pay for this web site", but what about online banks. We pay for that service, yet their web pages are still riddled with ads for their own services. How is that fair?
With TV, at least I know when there's an ad, and I can switch channels. Many web pages open too many ads. Pop-ups, pop-unders, ads with sound, animations, video, ads that jump to your face and you can't close nor read the website. I read this news site, www.infobae.com, and I strongly advise you not to visit it without adblock.
I'm fine with a banner here and there, but things have gotten nasty in the past few years. And not only that: one thing I really hate is websites that show you so many ads, they won't fit in one page, so they chop the article in tiny pages with more ads than text. Even the menu sidebar has more content than the article.
Whatever, I'll just keep using adblock. I promise not to use adblock when you promise not to bother me with your ads. Sounds fair, right?
Does that mean uninstalling spyware/adware is theft?
Quick, how do I reinstall my adware?
Because I do love the convenince of getting pop-ups without even having to visit a web site. What a time saver.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
Spin all you want about how it is theft or immoral, but the advertising industry can collectively kiss my shiny white ass.
So consider my ad blocking and commercial skipping as civil disobedience if that helps.
I normally use my computer with my speakers shut off, in no small part due to websites with advertising that makes annoying sound. I suppose that I'm guilty of 'theft of services' also? Aisle seat please.
But I am entitled to absolutely free content whenever I want it, and I deserve to have it exactly the way I want it! How dare the websites seek profit or reimbursement!
Is it also immoral to link directly to a printer-friendly version of a c|net article that spans 20 pages consisting mostly of erratic ad insanity?
Maybe that's why they've made the "printer friendly" link impossible to find.
You owe *ME* money, for all the bandwidth-reduction service I'm providing to you.
First they complain about the ads and then there are people block firefox users because some people remove ads. Yes they are different groups of people but there is no pleasing everyone. The only thing that you can do is please the most amount of people without losing money. I personally use Adblock plus with the Filterset.G add-on but if I believe in supporting a website(such as slashdot) I will whitelist the site and voluntarily view the ads.
What if web sites started using one-time ads, or timed ads? Then once you've seen the ad, it will go away and not reappear again (at least until you delete your cookies). Then you could browse the rest of the site without annoyance, and the site owners would still get their revenue. Also, instead of tracking your browsing history, why not just display ads that have something to do with the site? If you're on the site, you're obviously interested in what's on it, otherwise you wouldn't be there. I think the targeted ads are just silly, especially since they're so off most of the time. It'd be much simpler and more effective if all sites just displayed ads relative to their content without having a script do it for them.
A casino has a cheap buffet because they *hope* you are going to gamble before/after you eat. You, being a clever person, attend the buffet and leave without spending a dime on the slot machines.
Arby's has a "five for five" deal where you buy five items for five bucks because they *hope* you will spend five dollars instead of, say, two dollars. You, being a clever person, realize you only want two of the five items, so you spend $2.50 on two items and leave.
Circuit City sells printers for only $30 because they *hope* you are going to pay $20 for a high-margin Monster Cable. You, being a clever person, buy the cheap printer and purchase a generic cable for $2 from Fry's.
CNN.com offers their content for free because they *hope* you will click on their ads (or at least glance at them) while you visit. You, being a clever person, ignore the ads or disable them outright.
The point is, any free or below-cost business model is a risk that the provider has accepted, and they are inherently providing these extra "benefits" at *no obligation* to the consumer. If the provider isn't willing to run the risk of people not following their suggestions, then it is time to turn that suggestion into an obligation (pay websites, or otherwise restricted-access websites). This is not a morality issue for the consumer, it is a business issue for the provider.
OK, this is really over-hyped IMO too.
..... just plain stupid ..... honestly i am not sure if the ads or the site content does that all the time, but I saw ads do that. Also the constant pinging of browsers with timed ajax req-s can have the same effect when you have 10+ sitting in tabs....
If your site is getting revenue from expressions, maybe you have a point, but then again, if you can make money on just expressions, then you run something big anyway.
If your site gets revenue after clicks or "per action" (signup, purchase) then you are not losing anything on these guys anyway:
Why ? Because they block your ad not to see it. If they block it, they would not click on it in the first place, thus you would not make a revenue wether the ad is displayed or not.
+ you save bandwidth for yourself and the ad network serving the usually large and annoying flash ads.
Just for the record : i do not use ad blocking, but some ads on sites my wife visits drive me crazy. Her unattended browser would constantly pull large images from sites even when the browser is idle
just my 2c
I generally leave ad's on, I don't care if there's a banner at the top of the page or somet stuff on the side, it doesn't make a difference to me and yes, hosting websites are never free, someone has to pay for the bandwidth and salaries of someone keeping the site up. If someone provides me a free service, and makes their revenue by showing a banner, so be it.
Only in cases where it is extremely annoying or in your face, stuff like popups, sound, or where the adserver is so slow it make an impact on serving (i refuse to sit and wait literaly a minute for each page load just so I can ignore an Ad.. let's see "open page" wait a minute "click search" wait a minute "search" wait a minute "find out it's not what i wanted, click search again" wait a minute yadda yadda) The morality of that may be questionable, but that's what I do.
Maybe banner ads aren't the best thing. Maybe adds that move, flash, blink, block my mouse, interrupt my article, play videos, and use up my bandwidth are not appealing.
Maybe, just maybe, you can mention your product without annoying people. You might have to think on this one, and I know your ideas are usually bad based off the quality of advertising I see, but it might be a better use of those grey cells than calling people thieves.
Here's a simple idea. Put 'brought to you by Acme' in the Title of the page. That wouldn't annoy me. What's wrong with Slashdot: news for nerds, stuff that matters. (sponsored today by Pepsi).
A nice simple text line that doesn't make people want to destroy you, but gets their subconscious thinking about a delicious sugary drink.
The future of TV may be product placement and quick 'brought to you by' messages. Don't fight tivo and other improvements, It makes the medium you are advertising on more attractive
just my 2 cents.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Who will be the first to write a Firefox extension to block the Firefox blocking? Gentlemen, start your coding!
Webmasters will simply start being forced to do the full content in a flash application, so that ad and content cannot reliably be separated. ... and it will become completely unreadeable for blind or otherwise disabled people. But hey, as long as YOU don't get disturbed, right ?
Even if i do see the ads the webmaster doesn't get paid unless i click and i'm not stupid enough to click ads EVER.
NO ONE HAS A RIGHT TO MAKE MONEY OFF ADS it is completely optional
What about the tons of sites that are 100% ad free.
Seems to me that if you run a site for the purpose of making money off of ads you're a scumsucking assbag.
I hope they don't forget about bona-fide modem users, when banning Firefox and similar technology just to suit the marketers.
It's not theft to prevent download of ads, it's a market response.
Lets say a company wants to advertise and pays x amount for an ad run that's annoying and intrusive. As a result, it gets fewer hits and results in an ad revenue of y where y is much less than x. the gap between x and y are both a fault of the company for:
A. poorly executing an ad causing a market reaction and
B. overpaying for an ad-slot that may not have been worth that much in the first place.
The market always and always should have a right to react.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
If someone is actively implementing ad blocking, clearly they are not "waiting" for anything. They're taking control of their browser back. Nothing wrong with that.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft?
But if I block all the ads, won't the web site have to serve me far less bits?
On so many sites now the ads are the *bulk* of the served content in terms of raw bits.
So by blocking ads, I save the web site time and money. Q.E.D.
See, I can make hand waving arguments, too!
This entire issue seems absurd to me. There is nothing that requires me (technically or ethically) to download or view any part of any website. If I browse using Lynx, I won't see any graphical ads -- does that make Lynx, or the use of it, unethical? If I'm visually impaired and using accessibility tools to access the web, odds are I'll miss the graphical ads. Is that unethical?
Anyone can write a web client, and make it do whatever they want to render or otherwise process web content. If I want to write a client that replaces every occurrence of the word "the" with "ocelot", there's no technical or legal obstacle in my way. Similarly, if I want to strip anything that looks like an ad, that is between me and my tools.
If a website needs revenue, let it make its case to me, and I'll pay for it -- through a formal subscription, or donations -- if I agree. I've paid for web content using both subscriptions and donations. What shouldn't be done is to attempt to warp the entire technical and ethical basis of the web to help people enforce a particular rendering model just because they wrote a bad business plan.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
If the ads weren't so obnoxious and if the ads did not contain the threat of information theft, spyware, and other issues then I and many others would not see the need to find ways to block the ads. If I did not want webmasters to earn their keep by selling ads, then I would not visit sites like Slashdot.org!
As a consumer on the web, I feel like I am entitled to a certain degree of annonimity and privacy. This is why I abhor spyware, trojans, and other malware which are occasionally delivered by pop-ups and even banner ads. Until there is some way to guarantee that I am being given the privacy I desire and the security I demand, then I am entitled to use tools to help me assure that my privacy and security remain intact. Sadly, my Windows machines have entire suites of software installed to help assure me that I am safe. Sadly, some of these tools actually detract from my surfing experience. Web-bugged pictures show up as red X's and sometimes, I would really like to see these pictures.
When the web is less like the wild wild west and is more civilized, then maybe I will not need so much protection but then, it will be so plain and uninspiring that I will probably not feel the need to visit it so much.
If
Websites are paid per click
I never click adverts
Bandwidth costs money
Then surely I'm saving site owners money when I opt-out of ads?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
"1. Have sound. If it does your so forever block from my browser and wallet its not even funny"
Can you tell that to all the stupid silly people on myspace that think everyone wants to hear the same crappy song that they like, just because you view their page?
What ever happened to opt in.
Self proclaimed wannabe geek. You know how it is. Most of us who read this stuff probably fit in that category.
... to the problem is mandatory use of software prescribed by those whith ethics beyond any shade of doubt.
...
From the top of my mind: government, MS, RIAA&Co, SONY, Verizon,
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
i don't know about morality. i just know how things will play out if more people ad block: ads will get more annoying
how?
well, it's an arms race: if ad blocking tech impacts enough site views to impact the bottom line significantly, then the ads will simply impregnate themselves into the page in a way that the ad blocker can't block them. and then ad blocker tech will seek to sniff out that, and ads will get even more insidious: an arms race, ad nauseum
but that bring us to a horrible conclusion: those who use ad blocking software, in the end, only serve to make ads even more insidious and annoying, for everyone, not just themselves
those who serve us webpages have the right to serve us whatever they like. and if we don't like what we see, if the ads are too intrusive, we won't visit. we have the right to go to whatever page we like. the problem is, serving us completely ad free content is not possible, as it costs money to serve pages. therefore, there will be ads, there will always be ads, and you should simply make peace with that. but no, some people will use ad blocking software
well then, it is beholden upon sites to fight back if the ad blocking presence is large enough. any site that doesn't fight the ad blockers, loses revenue to sites they are competing with who successfully fight ad blockers. therefore, the sites with less intrusive ads lose out to sites with more intrusive ads DRIVEN BY THE AD BLOCKING VIEWERSHIP. eventually, those who don't successfully fight ad blocking become a smaller and smaller part of the websurfing pool
ergo, those who use ad blocking software only make the websurfing experience less enjoyable for all of us, by making ads even more intrusive. a perverse truth
if there were NO ad blockers of any substantial quantity, then the sites could relax on how intrusive their ads were. in fact, websurfing trends would reinforce that: if the ads are too intrusive, the sites will lose viewing public, thereby driving sites to employ less and less intrusive ads
less ad blocking software=less intrusive ads
so again, i don't know about morality, i just know about playing out scenarios. and ad blocking software is bad, for purely strategic reasons, not moral reasons
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
- Stores: online shops -- earn money via retail model.
- Vanity: random people posting random stuff, the owner covers hosting charges (my site for example). Sometimes the info is entertaining or informative but YMMV. Often covers niche material.
- "Newspaper/Magazine" model: people trying to shoehorn the dead tree newspaper/magazine advertising model into a digital era.
The profit avenue for stores is obvious -- sell stuff at a profit. For the vanity sites, it's a non-issue. As for the "advertising" sites trying to be digital newspapers/magazines or whatever, I feel absolutely no sympathy whatsoever. Think about it, when you buy a magazine, or pick up the paper left by the previous customer at your favorite lunch counter, do you actually read the ads? If yes, don't install blocking software. If you have trained yourself to be blind to the ads, then so be it -- nobody would accuse you of "stealing" when you automatically bypass the chaff.Personally, I think the "ad blocking" has always gone on in people's minds. The difference in the internet world is that it is more obvious that people are blocking out ads. Just like when people surf the internet at work, it is easy to see that the worker is wasting time. Pre-internet, that worker was just daydreaming while staring at something on his desk. The time was just as wasted back then, but tracking was hard. Ads in papers/magazines are similarly blocked in the mind, but tracking that data is impossible. Tracking it on the net though, that gives companies stats and something to whine about.
They can bite my flash blocking ad blocking popup blocking script blocking fat hiney.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
What you are entitled to is control over your browsing experience and freedom to view the web however you damn well please. Websites are also free to seek profit. They just shouldn't expect users to just passively accept whatever crap they want to throw at users.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
If only viewing selected portions of a web page is theft, mightn't the web page using up my valuable bandwidth with un-wanted ads also be considered theft?
:P :)
If sites are blocking users for using Firefox because of ad-blocking capabilities, big deal. Go ahead and do it. Here's why: if your site is so dependent on ad-based revenue to stay afloat, it probably isn't offering any service I'm terribly interested in. That is to say, the value of your website must be less than the value of the ads you are serving. Therefore, your site exists primarily to serve ads. This is not a service I have an interest in, and I thank you for recognizing that and redirecting me elsewhere. On the other hand, if the value of your website is inherently greater than the ads you serve, there is no need to get upset about me not viewing your ads.
What about free websites that don't generate revenue on their own, such as Joe-Blow's blog? (I guess there probably is a Joe-Blow's blog somewhere...oh well.) There are ways to generate support-funds besides banner ads. I know this may seem insane, but it's possible. People have done it before (there was a time before the internet, you know.) If the content on your website is actually valuable, *someone* is willing to pay for it, or at the very least, sponsor it, so that you can provide it for free. What's that, you say? Nobody finds your content worthwhile enough? Then perhaps it's not, and you should consider finding a new hobby besides posting pictures of your friend's cat to your blog, or posting videos of you (*so* uncomfortably) hamming it up for the camera in your new MacBook.
Long story short: if your content is so bad that it's not worth the ads that support it, I don't want to see it, and you can go ahead and block me. Else, if your content is so worthwhile that the ads are not necessary to keep it available, suck it up and accept the overhead.
-G
P.S. Almost forgot: I usually use Safari.
P.P.S. I may get flamed from each side on this one. No, I did not make a complete and logical argument up there. I'm at work, so you can only expect so much.
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
As far as I'm concerned, it's not immoral to block the insidious ads that divert attention from the main content. As such, I use the hosts file to block particular ad domains that I'm bothered by. As far as I'm concerned, that's helping the website - by blocking the ads, I'm more likely to read the content in full, and possibly go there more often, perhaps even tell other people about it (and those people are a lot less likely to block ads at all). But I don't block non-intrusive ads (Google ads and other textual ads, as well as some flash ads), because they don't affect my viewing at all. Morally, I believe that it's wrong to punish a website that shows me ads that I will notice, but not be hypnotized by (spank the monkey, shoot Osama in the face, etc.), because the website is actively trying to find ways to make money without annoying its customers.
As a publisher of a variety of blogs and a hoster of dozens of forums, javascript-based advertising accounts for nearly 30% of our income. Another 30% is based on direct advertising or link-sales along with paid-for-articles (which we fully disclose), and the rest is made up by subscriptions.
We openly advertise that our ads are blockable, and that users who are not interested in ads SHOULD block them. For us, users who are not interested in the advertisers products should block the ads so that our click-through rate is actually higher. When one of our users blocks ads they won't click, our CTR goes up. When our CTR goes up, our direct customers pay MORE for the outreach than if we forced ads on everyone, even those who don't want ads.
We've been slowly updating our sites to actively disable ads for anyone who logs in and sets their ads to "none" (even if they aren't subscribers). Again, this is no concern to us.
The clicks we do provide to our advertisers are generally good clicks, with users interested in the site or product. This makes our site even more valuable, as we have had more than a few dozen advertisers submit bids for our sites specifically, rather than just random appearances because of the site being "on topic" for the ads. Directly bid ads get us a LOT more CPC or CPM (sometimes in the $1-$2+ range), so again it is good that non-interested readers would disable ads, making our click-through even higher for those direct ads.
Considering that we're making a decent 5 figures annually, more than 1/2 of that from direct advertisers rather than random AdSense ads, I think it's a win-win situation. Users who like what we write will either pay, or accept ads. Users who don't want ads don't display them, but they still give us a profit by being responsive to things written via e-mail or combox responses. I'd rather get 5 minutes of a person's time to respond than $0.15 for some random ad click.
When you run an ad-sponsored site, you have two choices: get a lot of crappy traffic and get low CPM (barely covering your hosting cost), or get GOOD limited traffic and get a high CPM from those accepting ads (or getting a profit through a subscription or an intellectual profit from a reply or an e-mail).
- No pages where the ad content makes the page take longer than 2 seconds to load
- No ads that make noise
- No popups or popunders
- No ads that aggravate my epilepsy
With all of the adblockers out there, have you noticed that nobody tries to block google's ads? They'd be easy to block, yet no one blocks them. The reason is that they are- relevant
- don't irritate the user
Take the lesson, online advertisers. Take the lesson.They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
So what you're saying is never click on links in anything, and never visit new pages?
I don't run an ad-blocker, and I don't frequent any sites that engage in such activities, but I get very tired of cleaning up after a Google search lands me on one of those bastards.
I will grant you that many folks use an ad-blocker when just ignoring the damn things would suffice.
This sig was generated randomly by one million monkeys with Speak 'n Spells. . .
If I've got this right and understood the article properly:
Clients who don't like ads and use firefox can install an add-on to block ads. This denies advertisers the chance to sell their wares to those users.
So, in resoponse, advertisers are blocking all firefox users, which means denying them the chance to sell their wares to all firefox users.
Weird logic. F(Firefox users) is a subset of A(All users). The subset of (F) called B(Blocking users) decide to block our adverts, so in response we are going to block the set of users (F) which is larger than the subset of users (B) that were missing our ads in the first place?
America, Home of the Brave.
Right, and web sites are free to redirect freeloading firefox users to a different site if they please, so they're not donating their content and bandwidth for free.
You forget one thing, troll. Once those bits hit the computer (that is - MY COMPUTER) I'll do with them what I please.
If the ad people were so worried about their kids, maybe they'd create ads that DON'T annoy, deceive, track, cover up the page you're trying to view, contain annoying animations you can't shut off, or cause seizures (you know the ads...stupid flashing monstrosities)
Unblockable ads? Yeah, good luck with that. Any site stupid enough to sign up for such a thing will find itself blocked. Still, if someone created them, they'd make a bit of money off the stupid and gullible before the public lashback sent a website or two into bankruptcy.
Just curious, do any Adblock users ever feel guilty about using it indiscriminately? Because I sure don't. And I tend to feel guilty about a lot of things that some other people don't (it sucks). I rather enjoy living a mostly commercial-free life, between DVR, DVDs, and ad-free web browsing. The world seems so much...quieter? Not quite the right word, but it is close enough. I think I probably rationalize it by saying to myself, "advertising is only becoming more and more commonplace, so I'm going to push back however much I can."
I strictly block Flash ads, and I block them because too much Flash turns the otherwise mild-mannered Firefox into a lumbering, resource-munching behemoth. If you want me to see your ads, don't use Flash. It's that simple.
If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft?
By that logic, isn't the website designer engaged in theft too? The designer is earning revenue by sending me unwanted ads that consume bandwidth (and the electricity to run my PC during that time, the CPU cycles consumed by displaying that ad, etc) that I'm paying for. Same for Radio / TV - they use electricity with their unwanted ads.
Advertiser supported content ceased to be a all-or-nothing / take-it-or-leave-it package deal as soon as people learned to skip over ads in the newspaper, change channels during commercials on the radio, fast forward commercials on thier VCR lately come TIVO. Is that theft? all that's happening now is that the web is catching up. Content providers will have to adjust - and by the way, historically they have adjusted: Short advertisements spoken during radio shows ("And now its time for the sports update brought to you by Roto Rooter!"), and on Television, banner ads / tickers / popups during the regular show and during the credits, billboards in sports stadiums that show up on TV during the game, etc.
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
It's behavior shifting. Intrusive and flashy ads are blocked. Subtle Google Adwords are not.So the ad companies can just try to be less intrusive and they get through. You do popups, java overlays, annoying flash ads then you get blocked.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Websites have ads now? You're pulling my leg.
If a website wants you to view ads, they should make viewing their website contingent on not blocking ads. They should display this notice prominently, perhaps at an intermediary page before the content and make it part of their terms of use.
In this situation, I would know that I have no interest in visiting the site. However, until the terms of use expressly state I cannot block ads, it is quite a piece of "political speak" to say that viewing the site with an adblocker is "stealing". It's only stealing if the site says I can't block. Barring any statement to the contrary, I've done nothing wrong. BTW, hiding a no-blocking clause in a 20 page document of boilerplate terms of use isn't notice. Prominent display please so I can know to go away and never return. That way we are both happy.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
So I should sit tight every time there's an ad break on the telly, cause otherwise I stealing network resources from broadcasters? Fuck off and get a life, seriously, if you can't get me to purchase your product without boring the shit of me (e.g., by actually having a product that is worth buying) what the fuck are you doing in business? Do you expect society to subsidise your incompetence, with their precious time, just so you can try and brain wash them to your brand name?
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
If the website owner feels it is necessary to use ads to support the cost of being on the internet, then the least they can do is avoid the flash "Bonk the _____ and get a ______" ads. If they aren't willing to do that then whether they like it or not I'm blocking their ads.
I feel the same way. I'm okay with non-intrusive ads, and I do (admittedly rarely) click on them. However, a site full of pop-ups, flash ads, or (worse) flash ads with audio and video will NEVER earn an ad click from me. They'll usually never get a second visit from me.
Given that criteria for what I'll accept, I find that you don't really need AdBlock. NoScript works well enough. Every single obnoxious ad requires either JavaScript, Java, Flash, or some combination thereof. If you don't white-list ad sites, then you'll never see the kind of ads that everybody hates while still rewarding people who use less obnoxious advertising.
Animated GIF ads and interstitial ads can still be a problem, but 95%+ of bad actors are dealt with with NoScript. As a bonus, you keep yourself safe from JS and XSS attacks.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Tough shit.
It's not about "right". It's about reality. If the user wants to block your ads then tough shit. If your business fails then tough shit. If those same users cry when your site goes away tough shit.
Why are modern businesses crying foul every time they think their god given right to revenue is endangered? You want capitalism but you don't want truly free markets? Tough shit.
Whereas TiVo users freeload on the relatively fixed broadcasting costs paid by TV networks,...
Hold on right there skippy. My agreement with the cable company says that I pay them $x/mo and they pay each of the channels they provide some portion of that $x to provide the content for me. This includes channels that are part of my package that I wouldn't watch if I had a true a la carte structure (I'm looking at you, ESPN*). The cable company then provides me with content. If I don't want to watch the ads and the channels think they're not getting the revenue they need to keep operating, they can renegotiate their rates with the cable company, find another revenue stream, or quit broadcasting.
If things weren't so horribly intrusive and capable of tracking a user's entire internet experience, for the sole purpose of selling you stuff, people wouldn't bitch.
The primary reason I disable Flash and block ads was due to the extreme annoyance of ads. Every now and then I'll visit a site which I don't have a block for and see those stupid jumping around ads which look like a Windows system notification with jumping beans embedded. I'm particularly vexed by flash ads with all their damn animations.
A good ad should catch your attention with its message or an interesting design. Motion catches your attention, or more like, distracts you from reading content, which is defeating the site as well (how can you read their content if some jumping gif or flashy flash is constantly drawing your eyes toward it?) Be reasonable in regard to accepting ads and I won't block them. Allow disruptive crap and I'll do everything in my power to disable it.
As for those dhtml or whatever they are, which place some object over the content until I click close or wait for it to expire, well, there's old browsers out there which won't understand that junk and I continue to use one, it's that or stop visiting the site because it's such a pain to access.
Lastly, there's the bloat of this stuff. I'm still on a dial-up and have limited patience for downloading some 500K+ flash or animated gif.
With the bloat of webpages these days, we are getting back to where we were in perception of speed, when the first 54Kbaud modems hit the shelves. Everything was so fast, but pages were tiny and didn't contain loads of unnecessary behind the scenes content generated by IDEs. At some point Broadband will appear choked and slow.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Send their kids to college... Come on... That's the most irritating justification I can think of for your position. Why not just go ahead and make it people want to pay for their dying mothers cancer treatment. If you want to live in a market free from regulations, as you apparently do, then you have to accept people blocking ads as part of that. Not allowing it would be giving one side an unfair advantage. The owners of web sites have every right to stop posting new content to spite the ad blocking consumers.
Advertisers are trying hard to track you and employee ever more aggressive methods to do so. Is that right? I'm not blocking any ads, I'm blocking the method of tracking me. Let me see the ad while blocking and I'm fine with that. There is also the added benefit of not having to wait. Ads really do slow pages down allot. There is more to this issues, but I don't have time. Again I don't mind the ad, but their using my bandwidth, time, and computer to try to invade my privacy. It is right? Is it moral?
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
If the website owner decides to provide you access to his site on the condition you do not block ads, it is immoral to do so. Of course people still will block ads. I think ads are going to be more and more server based rather than included as banners or iframes. At the time the page is dynamically created on the server, it will query the adserver to know what to include. Of course it'll still be possible to block certain parts of the DOM, but this implies detecting ad, which can be tricky, especially if they mutate. An ad could even have an evolution based strategy where ad impressions are detected and the DNA of the ad is passed along to the server, this would automatically tailor fit ads to escape counter-measures. Tricky, tricky indeed. The ultimate way for an ad to sneak in is of course through product placement.
\u262D = \u5350
I've got adblock. While it's cut down on the number of ads I see here on Slashdot, some are still making it through. Someone got a better list to dump in the hosts table?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
But it is cutting off the tail to spite the nose. Just like with other media, someone has to pay. Either its advertisers or subscribers. If people continue to block ads even sites like Slashdot may close or charge a fee. Some blogs like Engadget publicly regularly acknowledge the sponsorship on Fridays.
I'd like to see them try.
What difference does it make whether I block ads or ignore them? Don't most sites these days require that you CLICK on the ads to make money? Am a "freeloading" if I ignore the ads?
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Your comment was ridiculous and also nonsensical. Not sure if you were trying to troll or not, but I just thought I'd point that out. Your digitally signed web browser/HTML protocol idea was especially laughable. Why don't we start prosecuting everyone who's fast-forwarded through the ads on VHS while we're at it. No wait, let's make it a topic of discussion and expect it to be taken seriously AND then prosecute.
/. forgets how many people are still internet newbies, it doesn't mean that this majority of the web browsing population doesn't exist. Look at how many people still use IE over Firefox. Look at all the spam that still gets sent out advertising free products or money or stock tips. Just because it's 2007 it doesn't make it any different than 1997 for a lot of people who go online, fuck their computers up, blame Dell or HP or their children and then get someone to reinstall Microsoft ME for them so they can redownload they're stupid screensaver of kitten photographs. That's what most internet users are like. I used to volunteer at a computer refurbishment warehouse where we took donated computers, refurbished them and re-sold or donated them in a small computer thrift store. We would take repairs only from our own customers and they would always have some sort of problem. Usually, they had installed AOL or weren't sure what they did except that suddenly "one day the computer stopped working." This doesn't generally happen, as we all know, to computers. I also once volunteered with elderly people, teaching them the basics of going online and checking mail and things like that a few years ago. A lot of them were excited about the banner ads that kept popping up because they really thought they won something. And a lot of these people were only 50 or 60 or so.
So yeah, people can push ads. And yeah, people can block those ads client side. Short of hacking into the ad servers and destroying them from the inside out, there is nothing illegal about blocking ads on your computer. Finally, the web was never designed to serve ads, it was designed to serve web sites and content, and ads were a byproduct of that. Increase in web usage and browser technology has simply given more users power over what they see and don't see on the web without directly affecting anyone else. If the whole web advertising model goes to hell because of people blocking the ads on websites, then so be it, that's simply how it turned out. It's called capitalism. Firefox and Adblock are a free way to block content that the enduser does not wish to see, but the content provider wishes to push in order to provide revenue. If the revenue stops flowing, then the model is defunct. Find a new way to make money. The web isn't supposed to cater to advertisers, or anyone.
Anyway, I seriously doubt this will happen any time soon as long as people still use IE to click on "You just won a free vacation!" flashing banner ads and trust me, they do. Just because
Blocking ads isn't stealing anymore than not viewing them would be stealing, but if there is a loss of revenue to the website operator, by not letting the ads show, you are risking putting your favorite websites out of business.
Websites need to find a middle ground where ads are not so annoying that people block them. Personally, I can tolerate an ad that's inline in a web page, because it's easy to ignore, but I won't tolerate an ad that pops up a window on top of everything else.
Public Domain.
Rule of Acquisition #19: Satisfaction is Not guaranteed.
Advertisers risk the cost of using bandwidth in the hopes that a certain percentage of users will click on the ads, and of those, a certain number will purchase a product or service. Savvy users (those who install adblock software) tend not to click on ads anyway, so by using bandwidth to serve ads onto the unwilling, all they're doing is diluting the percentage of willing ad clickers.
When Firefox users use adblock software, they're making a statement that they're not interested in ads in general (they're not receptive customers) so why waste effort and resources trying to reach them? When that segment of the market has opted themselves out, those that remain are a more valuable market that advertisers can spend less resources to reach. This would allow advertisers to now pay more per click to reach a more receptive audience. These advertisers will still have a budget to pay websites, it's just that the "value per click" is increased.
How is this immoral?
I often go to physical stores to compare items like appliances and furniture. Am I stealing from them, if I spend an hour talking with a sales rep ( The store has to pay for cooling/heating plus rent) and don't buy anything from them? ( I actually had a car salesman tell me I was stealing by not purchasing a car from them after 3 or 4 test drives.) I don't really see how this is any different. I can name countless other scenarios where business expect my actions to result in their profits, but I don't commit those actions ( paying off credit card every month, trial offers, ect). The sites I willingly visit that I trust, I usually want to see the ads, as they sometimes advertise things I want in a non obtrusive manner. So no I don't feel its ever theft to block ads. Stealing personal information and tracking users, now thats a crime.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
There is no morality in advertisement. The folks in marketing are of the lowest scum on the earth. They lie. There is no law nor should there be that says I must watch some form of advertisement. A business should have no rights like an individual.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
When that equation changes and the ads take zero bandwidth and zero time to load (=opportunity cost*), we'll talk. Until then, you're advertising on my nickel.
*yes, I TiVo everything I watch and - unless it has entertainment value - I skip the ads. Which brings up a good point - if the advertising is valuable to me, either via direct applicability or entertainment, it gets reveiwed. For the record, trying to punch the money is neither applicable nor entertainment. At least not where I surf.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
this came up because I was wondering how to get rid of that annoying advertisement at the top of every slashdot article. Installed afore mentioned blocker, and wala. Thanks Zonk!
Here's the business model (really simplified):
Advertising Company says they'll pay for x% of the bandwidth depending upon how many of the users click on their ads (the higher portion of users that do so, the higher percentage of the bandwidth they'll pay).
Web creator puts the website, available for free, on the web. They don't have ANY contract with the user that they will view their site. The user (surprise) blocks the ads. The user is breaking no rules. The user also isn't necessarily costing the web creator money (thats like assuming every pirated song is a lost sale). The content is free and there's no obligation to download the entire site.
HOWEVER, if there is an entry web page that one must go through and agree to a user license that states it will not block ads (or, even further, could say they have to click on x amount of ads) and you click OK, then YES, you are stealing resources. You're entering a contract and not delivering on your end.
But, I've yet to see this set up. All I've seen are people asking nicely, "Please visit our sponsors. blah blah blah."
Blocking ads (or even just not clicking ads) is akin to not putting any money in the suggested donations box when you go to the museum. The web creator is basically making each ad a suggested donation. Until they say its NOT just a suggestion, then its not theft.
A URL is a reference to a bunch of data. A client can do what it wants with that URL and the data it finds at that URL usually with the appropriate protocol.
A URL is not a push to the client of a specific multimedia presentation.
This is a welcome to the information age for the advertisers, this is not television, the clients can use the information supported by the protocol how they like.
The medium is the message and the information providers need to get this message about the medium used. (if that makes any sense)
It seems to me that this is fundamentally the same argument and counterargument that's been heard a hundred times...
A: You're circumventing our business model! You're evil!
B: That's because your business model annoys me and I have the technology to get around it. If you don't like it, find another business model.
A: But... this is our business model! We'll keep the business model and try to find other ways to stop you from circumventing it.
B: Didn't you learn before? Once technology has moved past your business model, there's no point in trying to hold it back.
Same nonsense, different day.
I have a girlfriend whose name doesn't end in
When the Adverts quit trying to run scripts and put cookies on my machine I will allow ads. I block 99% of the stuff with my Hosts file. Ads hosted on the Website are not blocked. Pops are blocked regardless.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
Blocking ads isn't morally reprehensible... you're only thieving sons-of-you-know-whats when you don't buy the ad-pushers' products. Of course you need to be not blocking ads so that you can click through and have your money stolen by purchasing all of the crap that exists in with world and is marketed on the Internet... Just because they make products means you have to buy them... so as soon as you all get with the program, the world will be a better place.
What I really mean to say is that the consumer should be in control of the content they consume (and this discussion should be about content). Of course, I know that's not the way the world works.
Crawling back under my bridge...
How about this: AdBlock Plus is modified to request the ads separate from the rendered HTML as a background process. Two options controllable by the user- display them at the foot of the HTML page or don't display the ads at all. The web pages would still display as quickly as if AdBlock were operating as it does now.
Here's the kicker to help web publishers: Another option within AdBlock could have the browser make background HTTP requests following the links presented by the ads. These http responses wouldn't be displayed- the data would be piped to
If this were implemented as a default functionality in AdBlock Plus, web publishers would see a significant increase in click-through revenue. By altering user-agent, etc. it would be hard to defeat on the advertiser side of things.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Blocking Firefox will be a very stupid move for many reasons:
- Only a minority of FF users use ad blocking. Blocking FF = lost revenue, FF is already at very high usage % in many parts of the world.
- By blocking FF because of ad blocking capabilities, it will only force people who hate ads to develop these capabilities for other browsers. In fact, scratch that. That capability already exists. Opera and Konqueror has built in ad blocking and there are plugins available for IE too. Oh and there is always the good ole' host file.
- By repeatedly bitching about ad blocking (and blocking some browsers), it will only make the problem worse. Mr. John Smith who has never heard of ad blocking, might actually read about and use one.
This is a war website publishers can't win.
PLONK! goes that ad-server's IP!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I could go to any web site, and say,
a) your ads won't be blocked
b) we can slot you into space for products
c) we hold web sites to high standards
d) we can integrate your offers directly into our browser.
and then to consumers I can say:
we've created a space where there's no malware, no spyware, no popup or malicious sites, no link farms, and you can choose to surf there for free, or, you can keep surfing on the regular internet - hope your anti-virus software is up to date!
This is my sig.
are NOT obtrusive
are at least likely to interest me
What I see is a band of idiots thinking that it's their God given right to display ads on my screen... any ads, obtrusive ads, ads who make noise, who shake and what not.
It's not me they are screwing, it's the advertiser. I will NOT click on obnoxious ads, and in the worst cases I will write a message to the webmaster(s) complaining and also publicly complain on blogs.
Oh, I don't block ads by default because... I am lazy. However, on the first offence, the ads for the entire site get blocked.
And, to bar the t, the appoteose of irony is a site heavily depending on ads to write an article how ad blockers are imoral, illegal, and give you the cooties!
Bite my shiny metal... oops... Nevermind!
The analogy to TV is not a good one, either, if they want to show it's theft of services. For instance, if I turn down the sound on my TV during commmercials, should the TV manufacturers be sued because I'm not listening to the commercials?
I might use different browsers or a computer without sound. Or a browser without tables, or a browser without pictures. The lack of configuration, intrusiveness, and excessive catering to advertisers is exactly why I don't use Flash, either. Should elinks be sued, too, for not having any of those? In an evil world, I could see Microsoft backing this lawsuit, too.
When a webpage is put online, the protocol instructs browsers to make several requests for other parts of the page. Simply not making those requests is like ignoring the "call 1-800-555-5555" repeated at the end of a commercial. Is not calling that number theft? Or perhaps it's like fast forwarding your time-lapsed show. But none of these examples are considered "theft".
Who pays to use the Web? I pay to use the Web, not the other way around. When I come upon a Web page that has some distracting content, I will stay at that page longer if I can effectively ignore those distractions. I do not actively enter a web page to seek advertising of non related content. If I am interested in a product, then I will go to that products web page. If I am interested in products in general, I will go to a web page that contains information on those products in general; Both new and old. Content Blocking as a Morality Issue? Maybe the Web Master should ask the question, "Can I have repeat visitors if I piss them off?" There is a softer question I can ask, "What brought me to your web site? Your content, or those who advertised on your web pages?"
"If you have many items for sale, and a customer asks for an item that you do not have; Then you have nothing." - Ancient Chinese Proverb
When the companies that provide the random banner ads to the multitude of website owners is able to completely police every advert they receive and verify it has no embedded malware in them, then we can start considering the moral and ethical issues of blocking ads.
time to change/evolve your business model. There are sites that I like to read but the owners of the site decided to plaster google adwords all over the fucking place. Then there are those fuckheads that try to make adword links look like links to pages on their site AND there is a hell lot of these website owners.
If your ads depend on flash well thats your own problem. I dont have flash installed and dont want to install it.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
If I am "stealing" their revenue by not downloading their ads, are they not "stealing" my bandwidth by forcing me to download them, i.e. can I start charging these ad providers for the bandwidth they are consuming that I am leasing from my ISP? Besides which, content providers don't own my eyes. If I don't want to see something, I am perfectly within my rights to block it. Can porn sites bitch because some people have parental controls that block their sites? Of course not, that would be ludicrous. What about services/products like Websense...aren't they "stealing" thousands of websites' revenue too? Sorry, but no content provider has any right to clutter up my computer with all that bullshit. I can't count the number of times my browser has crashed or come to a screeching halt because some asshat advertisement decided it wanted to display some shitty flash movie. Sorry, no sympathy here. If your business model is so flaky that you depend entirely on advertising to support your site, well, you almost deserve to go under.
I have no issue at all with Adblock, and wish that advertisers and those poor bloggers would stop complaining and start taking some action to deal with blocking apps! When spammers started getting blocked out by spam filters, was there a massive outpour of angry "woe is me" letters from the spammer communitiy? No, they just dealt with the problem and tried to get around the new filters.
Adblock is also a filter system, and isn't perfect. So what could we (developers) do to get around it?
- host ads on the same domain as the content. Not perfect, and would take some work, but toss the ads into a nondescript directory that also contains the main images for the site... this way, the directory can't be filtered out.
- have a javascript check that will disable the rest of the site if it can't find an ad in its proper div
I'm sure there's many ways of getting around the filters, but enough complaining already!!! If you've got a problem with Adblock, then do something about it (other than insanely cutting off all firefox users).Meantime, can we finally end this crybaby attitude that a perfectly legal system that takes an annoyance out of our lives is morally improper?!
That's it. If you set up a website, does the viewer have a reasonable expectation that it is a business as opposed to a "gift" or some kind of "loss leader"?
If I buy a woman a drink, we all know what my goal is. And yet if that goal is not met, no one could say that she "stole" anything from me.
If you put up a website, we do NOT know what your goal is. Therefore, you don't even meet the standards of me buying a drink for a woman.
Demanding that I view all ads on all sites is just plain stupid. And calling it "theft" if I refuse is 100% wrong.
As the eye-tracking studies done by Jakob Nielsen indicate, Users ignore anything that looks like an ad, quite effectively.
Advertisers do better with subtle text advertising that matches the user's interests than they do with big spammy rollovers, pop-ups and other advertising that has only succeeded at all because of the steady flow of inexperienced users to the internet.
technical writing / development
Here's one adblock software that works with Safari on a Mac. Its just been a few days since I've installed and started using it ..... but surfing the net after that has been like a breath of fresh air.
http://www.culater.net/software/PithHelmet/PithHelmet.php
Its shareware, although you can click the "I paid" button in Pithhelmet preferences even if you haven't paid. I'm going to use this for a month and if it's smooth sailing, I'll be more than willing to doante the $10 that the website asks for. Have any of you come across a better alternative for Safari on Mac (not to be confused with the Windows version) --> free or otherwise?
cheers, http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
For the last 100 years it never occurred to advertisers on radio stations that users who turn down the sound during commercials were "stealing" from them. They knew better. They were given a license to use a portion of the PUBLIC'S electromagnetic spectrum as long as they operated in the public good. The public still has the opportunity to visit radio stations and read their license stipulations and leave comments about the radio station's performance.
Then, corporate greed took over when TV stations (licensed to use other portions of the PUBLIC's electromagnetic spectrum) started claiming it was THEIR medium and that if you didn't watch the commercials but only the content they were broadcasting YOU were a THIEF. Absurd. They can transmit content and commercials but no one, absolutely NO ONE, has to watch every photon they transmit during any particular time period. That's the risk they take, especially if their ad content is so trivial or dishonest or begins consuming too large a segment of the time period.
There was a time when commercials took only about 6 to 10 minutes of every hour. Now they take 20 minutes or more, and in the case of Infomercials the full 60 minutes. It's NOT uncommon now for 6 or more commercials to run during every commercial break, with some breaks exceeding 10 minutes in length with only 2 or 3 minutes of show in between.
Infomercials should be outlawed. The cable companies are double dipping. They charge the advertiser for channel, and they bill the cable customer for "offering" the infomercial channel as part of the cable lineup. Are we stealing if we don't watch the Infomercial?
To make matters worse, the TV shows deliberately focus cameras on brand name advertisements and include product hype within the script of the show itself. And they not stealing time from us?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
It's your computer and your browser and your net connection.
On the other end there's another persons server, content and bandwidth. If they don't want to serve you pages, then they don't have to.
Everybody's happy.
It's the user's bandwidth, too. Every time I visit a site I expend their bandwidth to request the data and my bandwidth to get that content in front of me.
By the logic of the article, if a website is sending me unrequested kilobytes unrelated to the content I came to see, shouldn't they pay me?
These stories are free but worth money.
I don't hear any songs from MySpace when I visit (which is not very often). My solution is that my speakers are plugged into my router (a separate box running Slackware), instead. It has spare disk space (because I can't find drives smaller than 40 GB anymore), so I put my music collection over there (it isn't that big) and play it over there. Web site music just warms a few components on the mainboard sound chip. If there is ever something I do want to listen to via the browser or the desktop box, I can switch the audio connections.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I have no problem with this (as long as it's not done maliciously, such as redirecting to kiddy pr0n or malware drive-by downloads or something.) You operate a website, you decide you don't want FF users (cuz they can adblock), you escort them off the virtual premises. All very fair. It preserves my right as a web consumer to basic control of the content I want to see, it preserves the website operator's right to be stupid*. An eminently reasonable solution. Your hypothetical web publisher's position demonstrates to me that he has nothing useful to say to me anyway, so I won't miss it.
So, where's the downside?
*Stupid. Yeah, I said it. Stupidity is blocking FF because it can adblock, and neglecting to block every other browser in the universe in spite of the fact that they can all block ads. Solving the wrong problem ("firefox users are ripping me off!") is, per definitionem, stupid. In this case, the real problem is a non-viable business model.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
If things weren't so horribly intrusive and capable of tracking a user's entire internet experience, for the sole purpose of selling you stuff, people wouldn't bitch.
Not entirely true - They can set all the cookies they want; I have FireFox set to automatically delete them when I close the browser.
Personally, I object to three aspects of ads:
1) They take up part of my screen. Offhand, I see no possible fix for this, and so will always block any ads larger than my threshhold-of-annoyance (usually around a 10% top or sidebar). Google ads get a few percent pass because of their special "low annoyance" qualities (ie, text-only, nothing flashes or beeps or moves).
2) They take longer to load. I don't mean the extra 4ms it should take to download a 17KB jpeg over a broadband connection, I mean half the ads on a given page usually come from badly overloaded servers just as likely to make me wait for it to timeout as to actually serve an ad.
3) I simply don't buy things from ads. When I want a product, I seek it out myself. I research the field, find the best available, then try to find the inflection in the price/quality curve. Nevermind individual products, ads just don't even influence me (except possibly negatively, for especially annoying ads) toward entire brands or stores.
If a company wants to make a positive impression on me, they need only post complete specs of their products in an easy-to-access place on their website. If I have to hunt for more than 30 seconds just to find out what type of batteries Product-X takes, I cross it off my list and move on to Product-Y.
It may be your computer, but guess whose web server it is?
With that in mind, the web page is on a private server which is open to the public. However, the owner of the machine has every right to block users who do not allow for advertisements.
See, with big sites such as CNN, I feel that their service is an auxiliary mode of delivering information in addition to their other services. However, with smaller sites such as communities, etc., I allow their advertising to pass through because I realize that for most of them, the advertising is the only thing keeping their servers up.
That's my logic. Feel free to disagree, but I feel it's probably more accurate than the parent post.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Stop and think about it for a minute:
How many other sites -- especially online "news" sites have figured out that this whole thing is driving some serious traffic and boosting ad revenue? It doesn't matter if you're using Adblock (I do). Some ads are still going to get through (I never block Google AdSense) and you're still going to drive some revenue. Even then, some sites will be able to quote a boosted number of page visits which they can use to negotiate better payouts from advertisers. However you spin this whole mess, these folks win.
I've chosen to stop feeding the trolls. I visited one site at the beginning of this whole circus. I'm not doing it any more.
Especially ones hat block text.
...and I don't care of the fallout. If things I enjoy die from being starved off, let them find a newer less objectionable way to stay afloat. I've long known about adblock and other similar filters but haven't cared much (generally I just ignore all advertisements) but haven't kept them installed long term. Upon seeing this article I realized I'm not doing as much as I could be doing -- adblock plus is now installed and it will stay installed. Maybe if advertisers had worked harder to limit the use of blink, audio, heavy formats like flash and java, or just that advertisements bog down page loads we wouldn't be so at war with them (maybe more text based like google, which is acceptably non-intrusive). I don't want to punch the monkey, eff free ipods, and I don't think supermodels lounging in swimwear is a realistic portrayal of online dating.
Instead of moaning about their pathetic adds web advertisers should have a look at the people that make it work. Take the fashion industry as an example. They have managed to get people to WANT to view their adds. I mean seriously, you have people sticking pictures of their idols onto the wall, yet these posters are essentially massive adds for the clothes or whatever series or music or whatever the model is related to. Hair dressers have used fashion magazines for ages, and you can bet that the fashion industry takes advantage of this.
Then you have car companies. They don't just stick a pretty model next to the Prius because of the environmental benefits you know...
Movies use trailers, games use demos, as do computer software, shampoo companies, parfumes...
Some magazines give you "2 free issues" with an easy way to continue with a subscription. Coca cola will give you all kinds of freebess with their logo on them.
Now have a look at on-line adds. Most of them have nothing to do with the content of the page they are at, they consume your bandwidth, slow down your browsing, they are generally just in the way, and in addition they are easy to filter. Gee, I can't possibly see why they don't work...
So, let me see if we can teach these people a lesson. This is how the experts do it, take a hint...
http://www.dexigner.com/detail/files/11620.jpg
http://static.flickr.com/113/311915512_e24cc8c78f_b.jpg
http://image24.webshots.com/24/2/29/70/101722970ctqgDn_fs.jpg
The following one is particularily nice ; )
http://www.shop.linplus.de/catalog/images/gentoo_girl.jpg
Your digitally signed web browser/HTML protocol idea was especially laughable
Really? Let's try this architecture. The gist is, I carve out my own little space on the Internet with guaranteed ad showing, protection from download copying, and digital rights management. To do this, I must:
Make a web browser, all of my own. I probably want to simplify / change HTML to move, as you say, from a generic content, to a content model that is more useable, and also, to cheaply sweeten the pie for the retailers I'm trying to entice:
a) add support for ALL the Windows Common controls to the page - like, the tree, the listview, all of them.
b) embrace the table!
c) add support to the web browser so that images can't be downloaded from the platform
d) everything always https. Basically, I want to lock out people sniffing in midstream.
e) add html tags to support the notion of a shopping item and a basket, and build the basket into the browser.
Also, instead of binding web sites to my own DNS, a web site host would have to buy the name from my platform. But if I made the process cheap enough, that could work. Then, there would be an approval process for not letting every web site get in, and, as a side effect, I could offer my own search services from within the browser.
Then, with my offering, I turn around to various online e-tailers and say hey, if you support this browser, we won't block your ads, and we won't screw up your site, and we won't allow price comparison scrapers and all the other shit you have to put up with. I get a few retailers in each consumer segment, a car company or two, and then I'm off to the races with an IPO for a few billion dollars.
From there, I advertise my browser on TV, and then I sell out my whole thing to Google or Microsoft and retire building spaceships and maybe buying the Phillies a fricking pitcher!
This is my sig.
Of course the response is, magazine advertising is based on circulation. Presuming you purchased the magazine, your eye balls count even if you rip out the ads.
Web advertising is generally based on ad views or even click through, so if you don't download the ad, you don't count.
Of course the response to the response is, holes in your business model are not my problem. If you can't build a business on providing free content on the web, then don't build a business on providing free content on the web.
This is really a big cirle jerk for all the geeks to go on about flash ads and evil marketing drones and whatever. The interesting conversation is, so what's next?
For example with news, when all the newspapers and old media networks realize there's no money to be made giving away news for free on a web site, what fills that void? Do news sites become subscriber based? Do they just close shop? What happens to aggregators like Google news? Would Google subscribe to wire services to keep news a live as a driver of traffic for other products?
What happens to online communities and sites like /.? When I go to cnn.com I don't care what the other traffic looks like, I just want some news. However, the utility of /. depends on there being a community to provide at least some of the content. Some people pay for /. now. How many would continue to pay for the reduced content on a subscriber-only /.?
"Your business model is not my problem".
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
-- If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft?
Why not extend that argument to the products too? After all, it costs money to advertise and the amount the advertiser pays is related to the page hits. Are you stealing from the company placing the ads if you don't but the product after you view the ad? I thought ads were supposed to entice me to pay attention and to buy things or at least recognize the product. I thought it was supposed to be a temptation not a commandment to shop. I guess I'm not moral enough to be a good consumer.
Several other readers have pointed out various ways that advertisers are abusing advertisements to the point that they aren't just advertisements. Let me add one other point. When do a web search and then start going through the results, you often don't know exactly what kind of content you're going to find until you click each link and actually look at the page. If you don't protect yourself with ad-blocking software, you will hit all kinds of obnoxious stuff from sites you really weren't interested in viewing in the first place.
I'll also add on that if your view of ethics and morality involves supporting "ads" that trick Grandma's into believing they've won a free iPod or Caribbean vacation, then you should probably just stop talking. That's one point I failed to mention, ads on websites vary from ads on TV and in the paper greatly for the single reason that they are blatantly full of shit. Advertising, on principle, is based on making a product's image better but tricking people into clicking on some stupid flash animation with the promise of a free mp3 player is absolute, 100% bullshit. It's not even advertising, it's tricking and lying to people in order to get them to hit some page which translates such hits into pennies and then ??? and then profit. I'm surprised that with all the stupid lawsuits flying around resulting from people being too idiotic to understand the concept of coffee being hot (and the like) that more people aren't suing over misleading banner "ads".
I resisted using adblock for a long time. But finally I got tired of waiting endlessly for a page to finish loading because the banner ad server wasn't keeping up. There were many sites where it was clear that everything else on the page had loaded almost immediately, yet I couldn't interact with the content because it was waiting on that one ad. Sometimes it would even time out and leave the page in a useless state. Using adblock solved these problems for me.
Even if every single technically-aware firefox user blocked all ads forever more, the revenue decrease by ad corporations/websites would not be catastrophic.
:) )...
Who clicks ads the most anyway: clueless, naïve or foolish IE users. As about 80% (69% of statistics are made up on the spot) of the internet falls into this category and will keep on clicking on ads regardless of common sense, and these are the vast majority ad revenue source anyway, where is the problem.
The IE folks can view and click the ads, the FF/tech crowd can block them, and the ads/websites get the (not especially reduced) revenue from the clicks of the former group...
Everybody wins (especially us
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
As a web surfer, it is my obligation to make sure I take reasonable precautions protecting my computer from malicious sites, popups, etc.
obviously it is somewhat of a prisoners dilemma.
IE were all better off if websites were "reasonable" in advertisement usage, appropriate sizes, etc, and users view the adds. But websites make more money, for less effort selling a corner of their page to a advertising company. That company makes the most money (apparently) letting some flashy big adds flow through.
So I start blocking just those adds, but I loose my nice list on a dead PC, and I see adblock plus now updates my list for me. I started off hunting adblocking because of dialup, and large adds, on text based sites. Now with broadband, it's so nice not being annoyed I am addicted to adblock, and the ease of a complete list.
many Innocent sites now lose also. however, nothing prevents sites from hosting their own images, and text adds, I will see them. However it is still more profitable to sell out to the adware companys (even for techie, high firefox usage sites like slashdot)
I'm sure I'm not the only person who uses an ad blocker ONLY to block ads on sites with annoying ads. Like those stupid bits of flashtastrophe that ask for user interaction to do something dumb, or the banners with SOUND. Because, yeah. Everyone wants to occasionally blast some moron saying "congratulations, you've won an X" from their speakers.
Any site that runs shit like that, is not allowed to complain. Plain and simple. I don't think it's really necessary or called for to block ads everywhere. If there was some sort of advertising standard saying what is okay and what isn't, this wouldn't be a problem. (Of course, there'd have to be some way to enforce such a thing with fines or whatever) Popup ads? Gone. Browser-jacking bullshittery? Gone. Ads that look like dialog boxes or tell the user they've won something? Gone.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Next it's going to be illegal to take toilet breaks during TV ads?
And we're all going to have our eyelids forced open and forced to stare at ads when browsing the internet, otherwise it's stealing?
If the ads are really good I might actually tell others about it. e.g. the "will it blend" videos - they're ads, but many of them are fun to watch.
I also wonder how many extra Diet Cokes and mentos were sold because of people watching Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz's video and then going off to try a few experiments themselves.
I get DSl via AT&T who subcontracts email to Yahoo...who plasters my browser page with ads. I use the web email to check my email at work, and don't want my browser page plastered with ads that don't reflect the professionalism my workplace environment expects. Since I'm paying for this content anyway, Yahoo can bite me if they think I'm going to view their ads, too.
So, if ESPN.com put it in their terms of use that adblocking is prohibited, would you quit visiting the site? It seems that almost all sites with free content (even *gasp* Slashdot!) have advertisements... If all of these sites expressely prohibit ad-blocking, would you no longer have any interest? I doubt it. This is all just "I want everything exactly my way" posturing.
And regardless of what you define as "stealing", I think it's hard to argue that viewing content while eliminating the means of intending compensation is not morally reprehensible.
I ran two websited that used contextual ads (from the likes of vibrant media and kontera) as well as banner-based stuff (google, yahoo, etc) and I can tell you that the worst person to piss off is the one that doesn't want to see the ad. They were never going to click on it anyway, so why should you care? Most of our deals were cost-per-click revenue anyway so I didn't care to serve an ad to a person who wasn't going to click it and have to deal with pissing them off. A few months before I sold both sites (and am glad to be out of that business, though I miss the revenue), I made it so that folks could disable contextual ads through a profile setting, and added the ability for them to pay a paltry sum ($10 per year) to remove all ads site-wide. Folks were thrilled to pay a cheap price, I made some good cash, and everyone was happy.
I knew of folks using ad blocking software (hell, I use adblock plus myself!) and would never have done anything to that group for the sole reason that I wasn't going to make money on them anyway and might as well make em happy instead of mad.
Oh - and I determined that most of my ad-clicks were unregistered folks who visited my site for the first time - one of those dirty little industry secrets.
I feel old.
I can remember a time when I could actually load a page that was nothing but actual content that was relevant to what I was looking for. No one was trying to sell me anything or profit from my experience. Nor was there any kind of extortion being propagated on the pages I was viewing just because someone thought it was "ethical" for them to gain profit from information that they willingly published on a website and I needed and asked for and was provided.
See, the Internet was conceived as the most powerful tool in the world. It is a medium for a FREE exchange of information. How this bastardized commercialization of a tool so powerful it can harness the entirety of human knowledge and make it so readily available you don't even have to get out of bed to use it has demonized and raped the collective knowledge of the human race for profit is where the real crime is.
It's not the fact that some slobbering idiot of a spammer wants to flood my Inbox with emails that never even get opened. It's not the fact that some moron Russian scripter in Europe constantly registers bogus accounts on my Internet based forums that I pay for and are not supported by one red cent of ad revenue just so he/she can profit from my use of my private sites paid for by my private, hard earned money. It's not the constant barrage of ads on sites where the whole goal was to gain insane levels of readership and now they cannot support the financial demand that those insane levels require to support so they had to turn to ad revenue.
No, it's none of that that is the issue. The issue is that while TV and Radio are consumer products intended that way from the start, they cannot be compared to the Internet. The only resources my TV and radio use are my actual, physical TV and radio and the electricity I use to power them. I give no resources to the companies broadcasting on the airwaves. If I want to partake in those activities, I need the hardware to listen in. The advertisers have to pay for usage of the broadcaster's equipment to get their message to me so I will listen to it and buy whatever half-assed crap they are peddling. Why do the brroadcasters get to profit from others using their equipment to get their ads out to me? Why is it ok for the ad people to not be able to exploit the broadcasters but it's just fine and dandy for them to exploit me and my personal hardware for their gains? When do I see a profit for their financial gains from using my hardware to broadcast their content? I mean, you wouldn't think of going to work for free so your boss can make millions off of your knowledge and abilities while you struggle to eat in abject poverty, right? You work for a piece of that pie 'cause you have an advantage they need. Well, I have an advantage in my computer systems that they need and if they are going to profit from it I sure as hell want a cut of the pie too. If you don't pay your electric bill, what happens? If you don't pay your phone bill, what happens? If you don't pay your rent, what happens? If you don't pay your service provider bill, what happens? You lose access to those goods or services until reasonable financial arrangements can be made, then access is restored. Well I have goods and services that they want access to and until I see a check for my rendered goods and services, they will not be allowed access to those goods and services until reasonable financial arrangements can be made. Preferably in the form of a blank check.
The Internet though? No, not the same deal. I need to be much more committed to use it. I have to buy my own computer and the associated resources that go with it including my operating system, my storage space, my memory and even my CPU cycles. I own them and bought them for my use as I see fit and where my needs arise. Now I have to deal with some weaselly little scourge of an ad company telling me I'm stealing from them? Who the hell are you!? I PAID for my system! I USE my system for what I want. I DON'T want your ads! So I install software that shuts yo
Is there a list of websites implementing this FireFox boycott somewhere? I'd like to see there is anyone that anybody cares about on the list. If thing else... holiday season is coming up, and I want to know what activism my money may or may not be supporting, and do my own little boycott.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Especially when you combine it with the 3rd big problem of irrelevance. Web ads are very, very often for things you just don't give a shit about. TV ads are actually quite targeted, they get demographic information on shows and pick what ads to run based off of who is likely to be watching. However many web advertisers simply smear their banners over and and every site. Not to mention that many are borderline fraudulent.
I've found that when you have ads that don't have this problem, not only do I not mind, I can even be happy with them. Google ads are an example. They hold the record as the only online ads I've ever bought something from. More, I've done it several times. I don't mind them at all. The servers seem to be fully capable of handling the load, so they aren't slow, the ads are very unobtrusive and on Google itself blend right in, and they are very relevant to what I'm doing.
For example I'll search for something I'm interested in purchasing and rather than looking at the normal search results, I look at the ads. Here is a list of people willing to sell me what I want. The ad usually takes me right to the relevant page. Now that's useful.
However that's not how most advertisers want to do it. For some reason everything they know about advertising seems to fall out of their brain when it comes ot the web, and they believe that the answer is invariably make it more obtrusive and it'll work.
Generally, I let the ads in for exactly this reason. Most of them don't bother me anyway. It isn't like I'm EVER going to click on one of them, but if it makes the web site owner happy somehow, that's cool with me.
However, it's gotten to the point where I've blocked Facebook's flyers, which border on soft porn in the Vancouver, BC area. The truth is that I'm an adult. I don't hide in the bushes leafing through porn I found in someone's trash can. I don't oggle the lingerie section on the Sears catalog. I don't search the web for free porn videos. I've grown up. One day, my children are going to be watching what's on my screen and asking questions, and the right time for me to start making sure my screen is clear of soft porn is today. If web sites aren't going to realize that, they're going to have to have their ads blocked, and I'm not going to feel guilty about it. Not one smidgeon.
I don't give a monkey's about downloading the adverts because I have a (reasonably) unlimited broadband connection. What I care about is having to view them. I have a certain (limited) degree of sympathy for the websites that rely on advertising revenue, largely because I hate the pay-per-view model more than the advertising-funded model. I'm sure there are other people in the same situation. Surely it would be pretty easy for someone to add an option to the Adblock extension so that it would download the advertising content, possibly at a throttled rate, and then just send it to /dev/null instead of displaying it. Then everyone's happy: the user doesn't get to see adverts, the websites he enjoys get their revenue and the advertisers get no more and no fewer sales than they would have done had I seen their adverts, as I have a moral reluctance to buy stuff based on flashy but largely irrelevant advertising productions.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
If I'm not mistaken, Adblock Plus has an option -- enabled by default, IIRC -- that downloads blocked page elements anyway, then just suppresses their rendering. This way, a website operator won't even know if l've blocked any of their ads, and nor will the advertiser. The website owner will still get the same CPM out of me, because I'm causing him to be paid anyway, even though I'm not seeing at the ad in question.
So this is not a problem for website owners, but rather a problem for advertising companies. But that doesn't seem to be what all the screaming is about...
I'm sure there's some fancy latin term for this fallacy, but I'll just call it the War Games defense. (The only winning move is not to play.)
The parent poster is saying if an ad is static text or image--no flash--and doesn't track you past the single page displaying the ad, then it is immoral to block the ad. Interesting.
I say, my stand on blocking ads has nothing to do with the ads. My argument doesn't depend on ads being obtrusive or anything else. I simply say, I control what I download. I choose not to download from certain sources.
You see, I don't get into a debate on types of ads. I don't even really address the issue of ads at all. I just say, I download what I want to download. If I think I'll never have any reason to request data from a domain, I might use a HOSTS file to direct requests for that domain to 0.0.0.0 just to protect myself from any inadvertent requests I may make.
Someone who wants to take the position that there is something wrong with not viewing ads on a web page has to play on my field and explain why the ISP connection and the computer I pay for are obligated to accept someone else's data without my request.
I don't sift through every page and Adblock everything.
Check into AdBlock Plus subscriptions. You won't have to sift through any pages. The ads will be blocked automagically. That's what this discussion is mostly about.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
AdBlock all you want.
When sites stop getting the money they need to keep running and go subscription, or worse yet shut down all together, don't complain.
The whole model of ad sponsored websites is a social contract of sorts. They agree to provide you content, you agree to look at the ads which pay for the content to be provided. Break one side of the arrangement and the other falls apart soon enough.
You are not owed a "free internet experience". Free content is not a right, it's a privilege you get some some providers, but not your right.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
I block ads for simply one reason: ads that play music, or have an announcer, or whatever. I can ignore or not a general purpose banner ad, but when I'm browsing because I'm the only one in my family that can't sleep at 3 am and suddenly my speakers start booming for an ad, waking up everybody, the word enraged does not do my feelings justice.
I'm not sure that's true. Just have a flash ad 'ring home' to a script embedded on the site after it started displaying. Have the script fetch the actual content only if the ad has rung home. I'm not saying that it's not horrid, but it is certainly possible.
I only block adverts which piss me off. Such as flashing banners or flying "layers" which pretend to look like windows. I hate it. It makes mad as I remember when the web was decent, without all this crap. I am only 23 and I sound like an old man but I refuse to accept all these horrible adverts. A simple text advert or a well designed STATIC graphic is all that is needed.
Google did it right with their text adverts. I don't mind text adverts providing they do not get in the way of the content.
However as most sites go over the top (read: get greedy) with adverts I just simply block them (as well as Flash, JavaScript and Java). Much the same as with popups back in the late 90s when they were starting to become a big problem.
Without weighing in on the "morality" issue of blocking ads, the simple truth is that if enough people start blocking ad-supported content, ad-supported content will go away. I'm not even saying that this is a bad or good thing, just that it will happen. It'll probably play out in one or more of the following ways:
Content owners will revert to subscription-based models
Advertisers will revert to even more insideous tactics.
Ad-supported content will go belly-up.
I think that some people are under the illusion that you can rip ads out of the internet and that it will keep chugging along just as was before.
I can imagine that sites will simply upgrade the technology that displays advertisements to insure they are viewed before the actual content is shown. It could be as simply as giving the user a token when they view the advertisements which is required to view the content. The battle will continue back and forth for many decades, long after HTML and Javascript have died.
There's always a way.
- Yes, I am posting at a -1, and no I will not use a proxy to bypass my circumstances.
I never agreed to listen to each radio ad, watch every commercial on TV, gaze at every billboard, listen to each sales pitch on the phone, or look at their ads. They've never even asked me nicely to do so. Since, they don't care, why should I? I never read ads, and never click them. And if net neutrality is at an end, they'll need to pay to use my line. :)
Seriously, give me a reason to look at the ad and I will. Right now it's stuff I don't want, don't care about, and never will, presented in a manor that is beyond unattractive, time consuming, and detracts from the content. You'd think that if you made your money from ads you'd want to give a person a good reason to look at them.
PLUS! Not all ads are honest. I don't know anything about the person who put the ad up, and if it's anything like my inbox they only want to improve my sex life, or sell me drugs from Canada. So I'm immoral for not viewing crap from scammers and ads which I have never clicked on and never will?
This guys needs to rent Fight Club, then lose the loser job, get rid of all his stuff. His homework tomorrow is to pick a fight with a complete stranger.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
is the insistence of people who are trying ... and failing ... to sell us by using:
...
1. Sound - if I want sound I'll click on your ad.
2. Movies that autoplay - if I want the shared T1 to flood out, I'll click on your ad.
3. Moving images - if I want the image to move I'll click on your ad.
4. Stuff that gets in the way - popups, mouseovers, large giant banners that take up half the screen
When I got my degree in Business Management (Sales and Marketing), you learned that certain techniques turn off customers.
Solution: Stop turning off customers and we won't adblock you. I don't adblock static images or ads that only play sounds or move or play videos when I click on them.
If you don't get this, go back to school and learn how to sell.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I use Links to surf every single day at work for various reasons. Does that mean that I am stealing from them because I see zero images? Are they implying that I must have a certian browser to use their content? Well that is certianly their perogative, but in the same way that many people are with flash, you might need to make sure your design strategy is received well by most of your customer base.
Or if you are to be upset becuase I can't view images, just put a lock on the home page and charge people to see the content.
-Valiss
See, if the ads were hosted on the page you were viewing, then you'd have a point...But they're not. AdBlock and similar wouldn't work if it wasn't that the advertisers served their own ads for the most part, making them super easy to block. I mean, if I was browsing with Lynx which doesn't even offer images, or hell, browsing with wget or something, would it still be the same?
HTML isn't like television. Television is 25 still images a second; there is nothing to filter out except the entire stream. HTML is discrete chunks, and I can very easily tell my browser that I only want to view certain chunks...It's part of the design. I can change the fonts on the pages, I can reset the background color. I can turn off flash or javascript. Don't tell me I HAVE to view it like they "intented"...Hell, using Firefox it's often enough that you can't do that anyway because of some IE only horseshit.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The ideal solution is to use an ad blocker so you don't have to see the ads, then have an Electric Monk on-hand to watch the ads for you later....
"I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans..." --Wintermute, William Gibson's "Neuromancer"
Nope - CPM isn't dead yet. Not all ads are Google ads (which is where you hear a lot about Cost-per-click or -per-Action)... some people still pay to simply have their message displayed.
[DISCLAIMER: This post is a work of satire and should not be misconstrued as a holy text upon which to base a religion.]
Before I got too far into why I think what I do, I'd just like to point out for all that I'm a web designer. I have my own website. I pay my own hosting fees, and if I used FireFox for more than just development work (God I love FireBug and the Web Dev Plugin!) I'd install a plugin to block adverts.
Now to why.
First to start with why advert blocking, to me, is OK. First, the ads I'd block are those annoying Flash ones that pop-up and take up a large section of the screen. They force you to interact with them, if only to close them, and you can't ignore them. I despise that. I dent to avoid websites with those sorts of ads completely because I think it's sloppy for a designer to allow an ad to do that over their content and I think it's even more disrespectful to a site's users who came for the content, not the ads. Forcing your viewers to look at your ads just so you can avoid paying your hosting fees is wrong.
That being said, I have nothing against Google text adverts, or other simple adverts that don't take up large amounts of space or, in the best case, are actually related to the content of the site and somewhat match the site's design. Some designers say this can't be done. They're lying. If you control your own advertisements you simply say, "It matches the site or it doesn't go up." just such a line in your agreement with an advertiser will save you the issue. You can get extra bonus points for it if you offer to design the advert yourself at a discount to your regular fee. With this you get a little more than if you paid for a per-click ad service and your ads look nice with the rest of your site.
Now to those who block FireFox...
I don't care who you are. I don't care what you do. I don't care what your product is, you don't block FireFox. To do so is irresponsible in the extreme. As a web designer or developer you should be dying for your users to use FireFox! Remember, your loyalties aren't to the advertisers, it's to the users! They came to your site to see your stuff! Show it to them! And FireFox is the only other browser on the PC that's being used even marginally as much as IE. Ever built a site? IE makes you want to kill. I build my sites once, then usually again just for IE. It's that bad.
Secondly, and infinitely more important, regardless of legal issues, you're denying your users the use of their favourite browser. I'm going to let people in on a little secret, there is no website in the known universe, none, nada, that is so important to ANYONE that it should define their choice of browser. So you can't go to that stupid little blog now? Big deal. So you can't look at this new video site? Fine. The stuff is probably on YouTube as well, anyway, and you can use FireFox on that. So to all of you out there who are trying to ban FireFox, remember, you're not going to chance the way your users use the net. You're just going to make them stop coming to your site.
I swear, some of these people need to sit and think for a moment. What about those who use FireFox but don't block the adverts? Punish the innocent along with the guilty, I like that idea. Hey, it worked for Hitler and Stalin, why not these guys? I know that's a major exaggeration but hey, who cares? As long as some pseudo-Viagra company gets some woman to see their adverts then it's OK.
What about my bandwidth and my time? Neither are free. Either switch to unobtrusive ads, or go to a subscription model. Project Wonderful and Google AdWords have been working quite well. How did they do it? They went back to old-school models of web advertising.
Adverts on a web page are sent to my browser as links, which my browser must in turn request from the appropriate server.
This means that each advert on a page causes my computer to actively send and then receive additional data.
This results in real additional bandwidth usage on my part.
If I am using any kind of metered access, or even if I am using unmetered access but with one of the major ISP's who arbitrarily enforce unofficial bandwith caps, then I incur a real cost for viewing that advert.
So, me configuring my computer to not waste resources in that way is no more immoral than the web site configuring their page such that viewing the advertisements makes use of my resources.
Let's put the burden on the content provider, not the advertiser. In radio, their bandwidth is measures in seconds. Their signal to noise ratio is very bad during commute and popular talk shows. As such, I'm driven away because of advertising. If they moved down to one 30 second ad every 10 minutes or so, I couldn't help but keep listening.
Now let's move to web sites. I'm expected to spend bandwidth (bytes) when no such burden has been placed on the content provider. At least in radio, time given to an advertiser is taken away from the program. On the Internet, the content provider gets to outsource ad serving. If sites want out of AdBlock, then they're going to have to inline their ads on their own servers (or at least proxy the content) and interlace advertisements with their regular content. The advertisers would pay more (the cost of the bandwidth they originally spent) to the site to pay for the bandwidth increase. Then, and only then, will the content provider feel a balance of advertisements to content ratio. They might even get a little picky about the trash advertisers push.
See in today's television market, if someone puts up controversial ads, then the broadcaster is held responsible, if not liable, since they are obliged to screen the ads. A similar accountability for web sites might also clean things up.
How is blocking ads really any different from going to the bathroom during commercial breaks when watching a TV program? It seems to me as if it's exactly the same thing.
Just because the website owner wants me to enter into a contract with them(advertisements, of unknown but probably negative value to me in exchange for content, of potentially positive but still unknown value to me) doesn't mean they can force me to.
If they really want me to enter into a contract with them, they need to move to a subscription based model. That way at least, I get to see the contract, first.
6 Put hoops in the way of the shopper. I'm here to look at what you are offering, not fill out a subscription card for your hot lead database.
I won't even link them, but Lower My bills dot com got nailed for that. I went to look up the information for the advertised loan for the 300,000 fixed rate loan for under $1000 a month payments. In a classic bait and switch, I didn't find the information but was hit with a data miner instead. That's a quick trip to the hosts filter.
The truth shall set you free!
There is an implicit assumption here, similar to the wonky RIAA lost revenue math. The assumption is that a missed advertisement is missed income. This is absurd. I don't like advertisements and never follow them. Indeed, advertising will never motivate me to buy a product, but it can prejudice me against it. In a way, I'm given the product a better chance of getting my money by me not seeing their sales drek.
Yes. With one caveat. The notice must be prominent. Do not make me go search out a tiny hidden TOU link, and then bury the provision in a stack of text. Make it noticeable to me and I will avoid the page. Fair is fair. If a site really doesn't want me to visit if I block ads, then I won't visit. I completely understand that content is time consuming to make and the owner has a right to share or not as he wishes.
This is sort of interesting though, because a website's worth is related to the amount of traffic it gets. Thus, by virtue of my visit, I have contributed to the value of the site whether I block ads or not. I can understand why a site would not want to encourage me to discontinue my patronage, but if they are not going to make my visit contingent on ad viewing, they have no right to complain when I take them up on their implicit offer to view the site without ads. After all, the site does actually benefit from my visit.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The parent post ties in rather nicely with a short piece I wrote about two years ago (but never published) in defense of my work on Filterset.G. It may be a bit outdated, but I think it's finally appropriate.
The Economics of Blocking Ads
Preface:
I have nothing against advertisers or advertising. I have no interest in eliminating advertisements from the internet as a whole. Filterset.G is a tool, and is not tied to an ideology; there is no ulterior motive. Many people believe that Adblock, Filterset.G, and similar projects will be "the death of the free internet", and attack people developing tools to block ads (including myself). I have no desire to "destroy" the internet or advertising.
Reducing Costs to Suppliers and Consumers
Advertisements are unwanted distractions to many people (i.e. those who don't buy from ads), and ad-blockers provide an easy way to remove them. Transferring advertisements to people who ignore or don't buy from them is costly to both advertiser and advertisee. Bandwidth isn't free, and the bits often travel thousands of miles through dozens of machines to reach consumers. For those who have no intention of buying advertised products in response to ads, it is a waste, and can become very expensive. The host of the ad pays to transfer it, and many ISPs charge users by the amount of data transferred, so they pay to see it. Advertisers rarely pay sites for ads based on impressions (views, not clicks/sales) anymore, due to the difficulty in gauging its success, so passive ad-viewers (who look, but don't click), needn't be considered.
Increasing Profit Margins
People who don't buy from ads are negative in the expense/profit ratio for advertisers. Eliminating the cost of advertising to non-purchasers increases profits given a constant userbase. The risk, of course, is that people who buy occasionally might also block ads and thereby decrease profits. For this reason, I strongly urge people not to install ad-blocking software on other people's computers unless they express a desire for it. The greatest threat from ad-blocking is from people pushing it on those who do buy from ads.
Demand Keeps Suppliers in Business
Let's hypothetically say that all internet advertising was eliminated overnight (which is not going to happen). That would cut a major source of funding for web sites, which would force many to close, decreasing supply. Demand, however, would still exist. As supply decreases, demand would bring capital to the "best" remaining suppliers. Subscriptions, donations, grants, and sales keep many ad-free sites alive today, and can easily continue to do so in the future. Hosting a small web site is fairly cheap, and the increasing userbase that drives up costs also increases the number of potential donors, subscribers, and purchasers. A worst-case scenario would be a drastic reduction of economically unsustainable sites, which definitionally provide too little benefit to users to warrant their covering the costs of operating it. Many people would call this a "best-case" scenario, separating the wheat from the chaff, though I take no stance.
Making Ads Less Obtrusive
If public perception of ads becomes increasingly negative, they will become decreasingly effective. Advertising strategies will necessarily shift to less offensive and distracting forms. Many users vocally support the replacement of banners and other obtrusive advertising methods by text ads in areas distinct from page content. Unobtrusive, low-bandwidth ads may not be as eye-catching, but they are well tolerated by all but the most aggressive anti-ad folks.
Forcing Ads
Many advertisers and site owners are researching methods of bypassing ad-blocking software. If ad-blocking is only done by those who do not buy from ads, the outcome will become increasingly negative as their efforts increase. Many people are becoming more and more fed-up with in-your-face ads, and are starting to boycott co
G
I don't read the classifieds in my newspaper, why should I have to look at ads on websites?
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I walk into your store. I look but don't buy. For you, that's a lost opportunity to extract some revenue from my pocket. That is something entirely different than theft. You don't have a claim on my time, my attention, or the money in my pocket.
These guys are no different than aggressive panhandlers who shout abuse if I don't hand them a buck. Don't assume you are entitled to respect from those of us who make a living by means other than parasitism.
The only moral issue is that there are some shitheads who think they have the right to coerce their potential customers. Yeah, and if it wasn't for date rape, you'd never get laid. The only things you deserve are bankruptcy, ignominy and ridicule.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
Anybody remember "back in the day" when they just charged you for the pipe, and not how many bits you push through it? Soon as they started this dollars-per-megabyte bullshit payment scheme, that's when this kind of crap was born.
And now that the business people have that set up as the payment model, the exact same business types who saw the internet as a commercial opportunity are complaining. Well guess what? You can't have things both ways. Boo freaking hoo.
And it'll only get worse when net neutrality goes away. Suddenly, adblock and utilities like it are going to be the only way to view "non-preferred" web pages in a timely fashion. When the blocking software gets a notch better to cope with it, you can bet the same slack-jawed money grubbers are going to be absolutely stunned to find that people want to work a way around their clusterfuck of a revenue stream.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I don't see any. O:-)
How exactly will a webmaster find ads that users are willing to accept if the ads are blocked and nobody ever sees them?
I'll tell you. By hosting the ads themselves. They vet the ads, they host the ads. They don't just rent the top of their page for every crap ad in the world to get thrown in.
Those ads say something about your site. If you're so willing to whore your content that you'll bend over and take whatever the ad company feels you outta take, then don't be surprised if people start blocking your ads.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Users don't have to earn jack shit. This is where you are completely wrong.
As a webmaster, you bear ALL the burden. I wish webmasters would wake up and smell the fucking coffee.
* YOU (the webmaster) signed the agreement with your hosting provider (A dollars per month)
* YOU (the webmaster) signed the agreement with the ad network (B dollars per impression)
* YOU (the webmaster) are responsible for bringing to bear content that attracts visitors (C hits per month)
* YOU (the webmaster) are responsible for technical measures that ensure that users can't get content without the ads (such that attrition rate k -> 0).
* YOU (the webmaster) are responsible to maximize your own operating profit -- such that C*B*(1-k) >= A.
No where in this equation is the user expected to do anything. You bear all the risk. You are in control of A, B, C and k.
Wake up and smell the coffee, you whiny assholes. If you can't deal with this, then you need to get a new job you lazy PHP hacks.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Merriam-Webster:
theft:
1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it
Which means in order for it to be theft, it would have to meet the following requirements:
* It must be illegal
* It must be taking and removing of personal property
* It must be intended to deprive the rightful owner of said property
Blocking ads satisfies none of these requirements even remotely. So whatever you so, however much you dislike it, it is not theft.
And no, this is not nit-picking. Calling things by their proper terms is a requirement of a proper evaluation process.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
As a general rule the quality of advertising on the web is terrible. There are no standards of advertising and a fairly low bar to entry as a content provider. I don't use adblock, but I use Flash blocker which largely accomplishes the same thing. I refuse to look at Flash anything. If content providers don't vet the advertising, insist upon animations and other overt distractions, it is no more immoral that I block their advertising than it is for them to subject me to it. It is poor advertising practice to drive off your customers, or make them resort to technological filters to make the web useful. If an advertiser wants me to see something, try looking to magazines in the target audience field and determine what is reasonable. Content providers need to look at the ads that they are posting on behalf of advertisers and be discriminating. And please, no Flash.
Flash - the new animated GIF.
I am having trouble with the whole 'theft' analogy/comparison/description/accusation when its based on me not taking something.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Man, things are getting awfully oxymoronic around here...
That is all.
the problem is it gives too much credence to the advertisers' argument. You're saying, as long as their ads aren't too annoying, they have the right to demand I look at them. As far as I'm concerned, that's bogus. It's my computer, my browser, and my eyes. Whether your ad resizes my browser and cranks up the sound and plays the 1812 overture or whether it's a tiny line of 6-point text at the bottom of the page, it's my right to view what I want to and not view what I don't want to. I don't care if you have based your entire business model on me vewing your ads; I don't care if you will get deported or gang-raped if you don't get enough click-throughs... That is just not my problem. You don't want to share your content with me, then don't. But if you do share it, don't act like you have the right to tell my computer what to do with it. This entire discussion is a canard -- the premise that advertisers have a right to intrude on my browsing experience in any way whatsoever is one I reject unconditionally. If I can block your ads, I will, and if I can't and your ad annoys me, I won't visit your page. Calling me a thief is not going to guilt trip me into allowing you to control my viewing experience. If I could install adblock on my car windshield so I could ignore billboards I would do that too; when I read magazine articles I don't feel a twinge of guilt when I skip the ads and head straight for page 34 where the article I want to read is. What's that? You say magazines have already paid for advertising, whereas websites depend on ad views for their revenue? Too bad. As someone else said here, your revenue model is not my problem, and I resent your attempt to make it my problem by trying to guilt trip me.
First of all, this is from the ESPN.com terms of use:
3.
All information, content and materials contained on WDIG Sites are our copyrighted property or the copyrighted property of our licensors or licensees. All trademarks, service marks, trade names, and trade dress are proprietary to us and/or our licensors or licensees. No information, content or material from any WDIG Site or any Internet site owned, operated, licensed, or controlled by us may be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted or distributed in any way, except that you may download one copy of the information, content or materials on any single computer for your personal, noncommercial home use only, provided that (a) you keep intact all copyright and other proprietary notices, (b) you make no modifications to the information, content or materials, (c) you do not use the information, content or materials in a manner that suggests an association with any of our products, services or brands, and (d) you do not download information, content or materials so as to avoid future downloads from any WDIG Site. The use of any information, content or materials on a WDIG Site on any other Web site or computer environment is prohibited.
Now, as far as "adding value" by visiting the site... Maybe in a convoluted way, if the advertisers see a higher number they might think it's better to advertise, but I think you could easily argue that any benefit in the increased hit count is offset by the bandwidth wasted on the data transfer. I think they'd be financially better off if all the people with ad blocking didn't visit the site.
Just like downloading music is stealing from the RIAA......
Ok, then the question stands with modification: Am I stealing/freeloading by ignoring non-Google ads? I say, "no." That would be ridiculous. There is no contract either explicit or implied that obligates me to click *or* view ads on the web. Blocking ads is nothing more than an automated system for ignoring ads. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
That said, websites are free to block users of adblocking software. In fact, I'd like to see them try. I'm up for a good arms race now that I have the spammers mostly kept at bay. Bring on the pissed off advertisers.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
It is also theft if you don't actually buy the products in order to support the site. At least they'd be trying to push this one through if they could convince you that not looking at their ads is theft.
God spoke to me.
can they tell if FF spoofs itself as IE?
No because it is part of the HTTP header. There's nothing stopping me from going into telnet and writing up my own http header or using netcat to grab the http request from IE, Firefox, or Opera and duplicating it myself.
Companies will also find new ways to deliver ads - and those that do so in a way that results in more viewer ship will make money.
One additional point: the entire advertising scheme runs on taking your time. So when an ice cream truck drives down the road blasting the ice cream music, is it a crime if I have ear plugs in? It's my time, my ears, and my eyes. The advertisers are taking something from me, not the other way around. Consumers have zero obligation to sit around and give their time to salesmen.
I generally don't block ads. I disable all animation, flash and Javascript for sites I don't trust. If you try to get around that, I will not visit your site. If I see you trying to artificially draw traffic to your site I will not visit your site. If you are even trying to compare what I'm doing in any way to immoral behavior, I will not visit your site (In fact, I didn't not visit your site.) I have no interest in you. You are beneath me.
For the sites I do visit I will click on ads if they interest me. I've purchased a few items from thinkgeek after clicking through ads on Slashdot. I've looked at several game ads over on Penny Arcade. I've clicked on car ads for cars I'm interested in. I'm not going to click on your goat porn ad, your feminine hygene product ad or your ad for some other web site. I'm not interested. Show me something reasonably unobtrusive that I'm interested in and maybe I'll click on it. Otherwise leave me the hell alone or I just won't come back to your site. It's that simple.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Wikipedia.org, kernel.org, openoffice,org, microsoft.com
Advertising on web sites is a transitional source of revenue, much like registrations for shareware was prior to the open source era. Sites like Wikipedia.org, with phenomenal traffic and a tiny budget, show that ads aren't necessary to support a top ten web site.
I believe that most advertising on web sites is accepted in the blind hope that it will someday be a significant revenue source.
For me adblocking is an ergonomics issue. I block all animation on web pages because it gives me a headache in no time. Unfortunately, this means no Flash so no flash-only sites. I've tried Flashblock with limited success, but some sites just don't work right with it.
If the advertisers would eliminate the animation, I wouldn't have a compelling need to block ads. I really feal that the advertisers have brought this upon themselves because of the intrusiveness of the ads. When ads were static, I never felt the need to block.
Their arguement is so weak to begin with. Am I "stealing" a newspaper if I don't read the ads?
In the end, people who aren't going to click on ads are saving them bandwidth by blocking ads.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
That only detects if you are running/allowing flash. Not to mention that it is an expensive test. You'd have to do it for each and every HTTP request or keep some database IPs (not very reliable). That would totally degrade the site and cause much more traffic than necessary... all to stop the 1% of users who block ads from viewing your site. You're better off just letting everyone in.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
IANAL, but I'd certainly lay odds that no law is being broken. That being said, is there an assumption by free content providers that users will view the ads? You betcha, it's probably a fundamental piece of their business model. Should there be a more up front agreement (ie. like privacy statement links typically found in the footer of a site) between the providers of free content and their audience outlining this relationship? Probably. IMO, consumers should have the right to block ANY pushed content (advertising or otherwise); we're the ones paying for the bandwidth to our browser (and in some rural parts of the country forced ad's can't make some sites unusable due to bandwidth limitations). Do I expect this right to make some online business models no longer practical (including those that provide FREE content on the web)? Yes. But I'd prefer it that way.
Having seen both side of the fence on this one. IMHO, the Internet is a public forum. If the public wants to look at something, they are going to, no matter how well you hide it. If the public doesn't want to view something, they are not going to. The use or non-use of blocking software of any sort is up to the owner of the system (either business or personal computers). Not the entities that host the content, or the entities that provide the content. This is true for Ad Blockers, script blockers, anti-virus, and content blockers.
The belief that visitors to your site must view your ads has been around for some time. It gave us banner ads, pop-ups, click through's, subscriptions, and "push" technology. Each of these innovations has had some sort of way to be circumvent it, and the collective thought process was that the blocker was a protection feature, and needed by the public. Now that someone who is using those same advertising technologies and has not figured out a way to circumvent them, there is some sort of problem? I don't buy it.
The only persons that have a problem with blocking software, are those for whom the blocking software was designed to stop. the louder they complain, the more I think I need that blocking software.
For the millionth time, no. No more so than getting up from the couch during tv commercials, and no more so than turning one's head away from a billboard.
Next question please, and this time make it a good one.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I suspect sooner or later someone is going to get sued for blocking firefox under the americans with disability act. After all there has to be *some* disability out there that firefox makes it easier to work around.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
And regardless of what you define as "stealing", I think it's hard to argue that viewing content while eliminating the means of intending compensation is not morally reprehensible.
What you think regardless of what you might or might not think is dependent upon what we think with the elimination of considerations financially expected which you might hum and haw and piddle out this sentence longer.
Why don't you just come out and say it?
You think it's dishonorable to block ads. To you, it's stealing resources.
No need for your convoluted sentences with 4 negating clauses.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Mostly I don't block ads. I DO block ones that annoy me though. (sounds, flashy video - all blocked)
I will occasionally click on ads if they're the kind of thing I'm looking for - but that's intensely rare. I'll even seek out particularly imaginative ads on youtube and the like - and I do follow some advertising quality journals.
Any advertising that demands my attention has just guaranteed they've lost my interest - and WILL be blocked if I have any means of doing so. There's no excuse for popup/popunder ads.
Flip side - I'm fond of the "secondhand lions" approach to door-to-door salesmen and advertisers alike.... *wishful thinking*
My browser requests a page from your server. Your server evaluates the request and sends the page (or not). Don't want me to see the page? Don't send it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Make a web browser, all of my own. I probably want to simplify / change HTML to move, as you say, from a generic content, to a content model that is more useable, and also, to cheaply sweeten the pie for the retailers I'm trying to entice Go for it. Let us all know how Tjstork Online turns out.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Does Slashdot agree with this? I don't know if this site has adds. Or the others I frequent. I can't imagine many Slashdot readers at home view adverts.
Anyway, keep up your hardest Slashdot, linking to add-ridden self-publicising articles of twenty paragraphs across 10 pages
Your counterargument is that the webpage as a whole, with all its discrete parts, is modified when I block ads. But if that is the case, so too is it true that page as a whole is modified when I change the size of my browser window -- the text breaks at different points and the prominence of ads changes based on the width of the document. This provision you site is overly broad and so vague it does not really put a person on notice that blocking ads without modification of them violates the TOU.
As I said before, a simple clear statement prominently displayed is all it will take to keep me away. If you don't want me to view the site without ads, let me suggest this language with a prominently displayed warning:
Nice simple plain language. Even in "real" contracts BTW, there are times when prominence is important. For example, when disclaiming liability, it is wise to make sure there is a notice that the contract disclaims certain liabilities right above the signature line. There are times when courts will be loathe to enforce liability disclaimers in situations where the parties were in unequal bargaining positions and the disclaimers are buried. I would think a website could face similar issues with its terms of use if the information is so difficult to find, that people would unknowingly violate the provisions. Like a sign in the back of the store pasted up inside a rarely traveled hallway that said "by merely entering this store, you agree to pay to the owner $100" -- something like that simply would never get enforced.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I don't get you. You sound like you're some sort of "just work, you bitches" uber-capitalist. Yet you want us to obey some unwritten law and just hand a valuable resource to companies because they want us to, not because they actually do a good enough job and convince us?
I don't see a contract with these web authors that says I must view every part of their sites. Free newspapers exist (presumably often ad supported) and yet they don't come with a contract requiring me to read all the ads. So why should one industry get welfare and not the others?
Works in paper form don't come with these protections. I'm free to cut out the dirty words from Harry Potter and resell it. (I couldn't misrepresent it as unaltered, but otherwise...) There's no reason to believe that the web enjoys more protection, especially as skipping ads usually means not viewing a whole new site, something analogous to a flier folded in the newspaper.
Google and Slashdot are both ad-supported companies who welcome everyone, blocking or not, because they recognize that the network effect of a larger community helps everyone, themselves included. Besides, the only way to guarantee zero false positives in your anti-ad-blocker campaign of blocking users is to not have any such policy. Anything else could and will go wrong, ala Microsoft's Genuine "Advantage" and id Software's Quake master servers. All of which have disable legitimate users and hardly touched piracy.
So anyways, I think advocating a no-blocking policy hurts companies like Google and Slashdot who manage to do it right by giving an unfair boost to their less-capable competition.
You only need to detect if flash is being run, because in this way you intercept all kinds of ad blocking. And hey, I know it's not an optimum solution, but GGP claimed that it was impossible to detect if the ad was actually viewed, which was simply untrue.
Maybe relying on advertisement alone was a stupid idea after all? If your site's content is so good, charge for it. Salon does it, The New Republic does it, lots of others do. So you tought you were going to get rich by creating some crappy blog and boxing it with ads everywhere? Oh well, life sucks.
there's no place like ~
It would be an unfair and inaccurate test.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
If this is tantamount to theft, then so is:
1) Fast-forwarding through adverts (or even switching off my TV during adverts).
2) Covering up parts of my screen.
3) Not reading EVERY single piece of post that gets shoved through my letterbox.
4) Putting my fingers in my ears and singing "lalalalalalala" during radio adverts.
etc. etc.
I would agree that it is theft IF I was being paid in some way to read/watch these screens. I am not. Just cause you get revenue from advertisers that allows you to lower the monthly cost to me doesn't mean that I am "required" to watch/read/listen. If I excercise that right and it hurts your profits, increase your prices. Don't expect me to remain a customer should you do this though, that choice remains mine. BUT DON'T FORCE ME TO WATCH/READ/LISTEN to stuff I DO NOT WANT. If you don't like this I will find another supplier/website etc.
Rant over.
Karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
I can't help but contrast that bullshit with this:
Advertisement is Theft.
You see, it's
* my bandwidth
* my computer
* my screen
* my eyeballs
* my time and attention
Ads take a part of each of those away from me for a short time.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Stealing? Doubtful
.. "It's not my problem!" - It WILL be your problem when half your paycheck goes to viewing the number of sites you probably do now. Not to mention the impression you're leaving over people who don't normally think for themselves (quite a large set of the population - you're on Slashdot, you know what I mean).
.. but instead of instinctively fighting 'the man' (without even knowing who that may be), why not adopt an actual ad blocking strategy that others have suggested (i.e. allow ads until they pop up, play sound, overlay, etc)?
Freeloading? Absolutely.
There are a lot of generalizations in this entire discussion...
- Not all ads are "Punch the Monkey"
- Not all ads using Flash are bad - Not all of them invoke seizures. What if they're relevant to content? I run a gaming website, many game publishers have animated ads. Why is this block-worthy?
- Not all websites do or want to display "Punch The Monkey" - With the exception of Google ads, which can vary widely since most of my content isn't blog-like or other editorial features, the ads I run on my site are rather appropriate for the demographic and interests of visitors.
- Not all advertising is pay-per-click/-action. May I please have 16K of your bandwidth to create an ad impression in exchange for being able to keep my website running for you? I assure you my bandwidth costs are higher than yours; but your help in reaching that next 1,000 impression milestone (the 'M' in CPM) will help tremendously.
- Not all websites are based on $5 hosting accounts - creating, maintaining, and most importantly *growing* a web presence is time-consuming and costly. It's not just about bandwidth. There's hardware, too. Sometimes you need people smarter than you to tackle problems, here comes some labor costs.
Why is it wrong to want to be able to cover costs, and god forbid, be able to pay for other things in life with it? Not everyone is trying to wade in a pool of money they can't even begin to spend; some of us just want to live a slightly better life by being rewarded for our efforts at entertaining others. My website's not my first job, but I wouldn't be in my current position without it, and I wouldn't have gotten that far without ad revenue paying the bills for the time when it was.
I think what scares me so much is the sheer generalization that people spout around. "ALL ads are bad"
Maybe things aren't quite that bleak, and I hope they aren't either
Perhaps there's a way to open dialogue between content provider and end-user to communicate where their expectations are in terms of what ads they feel are appropriate and how they can make the experience better without having to resort to this 'arms race' you speak of.
I'd much rather spend my development time on new content and features for my website than deal with that sort of thing. I should hope that most visitors would, too.
[DISCLAIMER: This post is a work of satire and should not be misconstrued as a holy text upon which to base a religion.]
Theft? Huh?
It's market forces in action.
Giving something away for free does not obligate a recipient in any way.
In addition to the benefits of not having your window resized, obnoxious or undesired ads, etc. blocking ads helps pages render that much faster because you're not loading the undesirable bits in the first place.
Now some may say ads are small and don't take much bandwidth, the servers are not as fast as my connection may be, and I hate having to wait around for some ads.xxyyuuuxxx.com to get around to sending their data in the first place.
Incidentally, the Firefox security plugin NoScript does wonders for getting rid of Flash ads and the like.
So what's next, banning the use of hosts files?
Wasn't really addressing the moral aspect, but merely the technical difference between one server serving ads and a bunch of cross-site crap.
In terms of morality, that's a two way street. Other people have pointed out that, by blocking ads where you have no intention of ever clicking on an ad, you are in fact saving the ad company bandwidth. The ads aren't pay-per-view, they're pay per click. No click, no money, so, by your moral standards, even if I'm not blocking the ad, then I should click on it so that the site will get money.
Beyond all that comes my own feelings about what I should be subjected to. I go to a website to read an article to find that the article is spread across 12 pages, each page with its own set of ads. Clearly they don't care very much about my convenience; I would go so far as to say that they're treating me quite poorly. The question then becomes, should I add this site to my own personal blacklist? It will cost me nothing to ignore it completely. Or should I view it as the "printer friendly" version, which inevitably has less advertising. Or should I wade through 12 annoying, slow loading pages, simply because that's what they want me to do? Regardless of whether I view ads or not, my presence on their page constitutes measurable traffic that they can take to other advertisers to persuade them that their site is worth advertising on.
Frankly, I think most sites would far rather we block their ads than their whole site, and it comes down to that for me. Few articles exist in a vacuum; the internet being what it is, there is always a second source. Go to Google news, and you'll see what I mean. What linked story is linked from only one site? While content providers attach large offensive ads to their pages, spread their stories across too many pages, add annoying popups or animation, they can expect me to block their content. If they don't like that, they can block my access, and I'll go elsewhere.
I think they'll quickly find that they need us a lot more than we need them.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If I quit using Ad-Block and go back sticking Post-Its on my screen to block that dancing monkey, am I still stealing?
Fuck You.
Seriously.
Get on the B ark. Leave the rest of us alone. Shoot yourself now.*
I'll surf with Adblock.
I'll surf with Flashblock.
I'll watch TV that's been downloaded or TIVOed and skip the ads.
I'll skip the ads and previews on DVDs.
I'll block your spam.
I'll block your calls.
I'll burn your snailmail.
Welcome to the 21st Century. Change your business model.
*(Apologies to Bill Hicks and DNA.)
This is not an "us vs. them" scenario. The reality is: We love web content. We want web content to flourish. And we want more, and better web content.
The prevailing theme on this discussion is "These are my rights, screw them".
That's true.
They are your rights, and you can screw whoever you like in this world if you really want to.
But the question nobody seems to be asking is: What if everyone did this? What then?
It's also your "right" to waste water, consume vast quantities of gasoline, etc. This attitude is missing the point. Do you, or do you not want content to improve and increase? And yes, web advertisers have certainly pushed the envelope in terms of what is acceptable in terms of privacy -- but that shouldn't change the issue that content providers need support. And while it is your "right" to not provide it -- the issue of personal responsiblity still exists if one expects to continue free consumption of a growing base of content.
There *is* a middle ground. Stop thinking so much about what *you* have the right to do, and try thinking about what a better web would look like.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Does this mean I'm stealing whenever I get up to use the bathroom during a commercial on TV? I was unaware that I was actually supposed to be forced to stay in my seat during the commercials.
1. I don't click through ads. Ever. If I visit a website it is to use the functionality of that website, not purchase a loosely related product.
2. If ads are sufficiently annoying, I won't return to a website. There are a number of websites I actually like that I no longer visit because the advertisements became too obtrusive or annoying, and for one reason or another, blocking them didn't work terribly well.
3. By blocking ads I am reducing my own level of annoyance and therefore increasing the chance I will return to that site to view its content. At the same time, I am not depriving the webmaster of any revenue because I wouldn't have clicked through the ads anyway.
Also, there are a few websites I visit where the advertisements are annoying to the point where I'd normally just stop visiting the site but which don't have a suitable replacement. Google Groups is in this category. Its ad bar is so large as to make viewing news extremely difficult on lower resolution monitors (the ad bar is larger than the tree view pane and almost larger than the content pane at 1024x768). If an ad-free usenet aggregator existed I'd switch in a heartbeat. And for the record, I can't just use a standalone newsreader--port 119 has been blocked by my IT department.
People send me stuff via snail mail all the time. Businesses touting their products, banks pushing credit cards, shampoo samples, politicians, tons and tons of ads. I throw them in the trash... All those advertisers paid good money to print all those glossy color advertisements and mail their crap to me. If I just throw them in the trash, am I guilty of theft? Of course not.
The sender is taking a calculated risk that some portion of that crap will get through to someone who cares. The same thing is true of internet advertising. The advertiser is taking a gamble that not everyone will be blocking their ads, or ignoring their ads, or avoiding the site because of their ads...
The bottom line is this: Blocking ads is not theft any more than ignoring ads is not theft any more than not visiting the site in the first place is not theft. To the potential advertiser these are all equivalent because no matter how they try to push it, I'm not buying...
And no, I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt because some advertiser gambled poorly!
So I guess, by analogy, not looking at a billboard or just ignoring tv ads, let alone turning them down or going to the WC while they run is theft too?
Are the reason people started adopting the technology. I didn't fool with the stuff till they started obstructing the content I went there for in the first place. If they want to go to subscription based format fine....maybe they can make a go of it. Otherwise quit whining!
If I was deep this is would be profound, if smart then wise, if a poet then verse. Here it is, you judge!
We all pay for (either direct from home or indirect from work/wifi hotspots) etc. for Internet connection.
Why should we then [sic] pay EXTRA to visit a site that relies on adverts or be expected to view these adverts to justify being there?
We don't - we have already paid our due, and by blindly visiting a site that EXPECTS a random visitor to pay more is an obscene assumption when it isn't announced (imagine walking into a shop only to find to have to pay to get out!).
The solution is advert driven web sites that exist from advert revenue should be made to have a place holder index page that has the question:
"This is an advert funded site - if you agree to this, then enter and agree to view the adverts - if you disagree, please move on."
Make this a requirement for ALL advert driven sites.
They will soon go out of business, unless the adverts are relevant, non-intrusive, and 'nice'.
Since when are we obliged to view advertising? I pay for my connection and the advertiser has absolutely no right use it. It's like the people who bitch when I sign up for the no-call list.
Back before "the internets" became big, the was a phenomena called "local BBSs". Local computer bulletin boards that you would dial into with a modem and where you could chat, leave messages, download files, etc. Each user would require a phone line, so a BBS operator would have to have dozens of phone lines to accommodate lots of users. Early BBS networks, like Fidonet, required long distance calls to transfer messages between BBSs scattered around the country.
/.!) have done and it's what you're going to have to do instead of whining about people blocking your ads.
Who do you think paid for all this? It was the BBS operators. Sure their were some BBSs and services that had fees (like the Well) and many solicited donations, but for the most part the BBS operators paid out of pocket. And they liked it because it was their hobby.
It shouldn't be hard to see how this is relavent to web site operators. It on you bitches. Don't expect to make money unless you can provide content compelling enough for a significant number of people to spend cash money on. This is what the most successful websites (like
You don't have the god-given right to make money off your web site. People are doing you a favor by reading your shit. If your shit is really compelling, people might donate or subscribe. That's great! But a website is not a money tree, and you shouldn't expect it to make money or "pay for itself".
It doesn't matter which browser I use, if I get an advertisement on screen, I add their host name to my ever-growing hosts file as 127.0.0.1.
That ends all normal (typical html link or redirect) attempts of shoving an Ad up my browser.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I think it's pretty clear what that line is referring to. Changing the way something renders when you resize your windows is not the same as intentionally preventing something from rendering. And lawyers be damned, I don't buy the "prominence" thing. It took me only about 30 seconds to find that. Click the terms of use link, and it was near the top of the page. It wasn't hidden by any means.
Do a simple web search on hosts file advertisement blocking and you'll find quite a few different individual and groups attempts at blocking advertisements using this method...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
As far as I can tell Capitalism is neither good nor bad, nor have we given the authority to corporate CEO's to dictate what social values should look like. If I'm wrong on this, please someone let me know.
By creating the ruckus that made /. post this story, you led me to read the comments, which led me to Mike's adblocking hosts file. I'd been thinking about something like that, but didn't care enough to bother before.
You are now officially victims of the Streisand Effect.
Exactly. The only ads i've seen in *months* are the adds on hardocp.com because they host them themselves, and i don't bother to go out of my way just to block them. I've even clicked-through on a couple of interesting ads.
I run a gaming website, many game publishers have animated ads. Why is this block-worthy?
Because animation is distracting and because it tends to slow down page scrolling. If it animates only when you click on it that's fine, but until then an ad should try remain as unobtrusive as possible.
Having read a great deal of the posts on this topic today I don't see all THAT many people claiming "all ads are bad." The majority seem to feel ads are OK if they are static, quiet and stay within their defined borders until clicked upon. Sure there are zealots who think all ads are a pact with Satan, but they're just a small though somewhat vocal minority.
And you've entirely missed the rather obvious joke.
Free market is a key reason there hasn't been a world war. People like stuff. Pretty simple really. Can people use it in a bad way? yes. Look at china. Their survivability is based on embracing capitalism, as a market not a political ideal.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You see, I set up a chair in the park and started playing my guitar. Ignore that I've never had a guitar or voice lesson in my life, and only started playing last week after I bought the instrument from Target. But set up in the park I did, and put out a tin can so that people could pay me for adding musical beauty to their stroll in the park.
Can you believe that most people wouldn't throw even a nickle in my can? Bastards!! Why, some people even had the temerity to put their fingers in their ears! The NERVE of some people!!
You see, if they were going to stroll in the park, they should be willing to PAY for the content I provide. And they definitely shouldn't take steps to avoid it.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Simple solution:
Just render everything (content + adds) as a single JPEG image or a flash video and stop whinnying for Christ's sake!
Where is it dictated by law that I must allow web advertising on my computer? I was surfing the web long before any advertisers were around. I was blocking ads via my hosts file long before ad-blockers. I was recording TV on VHS long before Tivo. If anything, they should be paying me. I don't like advertising and there is nothing that can legally compel me to view it. Personally, I think any web presence that depends solely on advertising for revenue should be banned from the internet. For a while, the internet was one place you could go for information without having to sift through advertising. The entire advertising business model lacks any sort of morality, so why should I second guess my choice to block advertising. The internet is chock full of deceptive advertising links and is completely without regulation. Unless the advertising companies will allow me to sue them for being to exposed to something that violates my personal morality and freedom, they can take there ads and shove it.
When you allow advertising for these smaller sites, do you click on any of the ads? If not, doesn't that defeat the purpose of allowing the advertising through your browser?
Stephen Colbert on race: "While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad."
Just so we're clear. You are saying that I am freeloading simply by ignoring ads? Wouldn't that make a good portion of users freeloaders? Is that really how you want to characterize your users?
If not, I challenge you to draw a real distinction between manually ignoring ads and automating the process with software.
I don't know about your gaming site in particular, but most gaming sites I've been to tend to be rather "busy." Like magazines (particularly gaming magazines) it can be difficult to find the real content amongst the ads. Or worse, I'll confuse an ad for content. Anything that can clean up the page and distill the content and make things easier to read is worth using. This makes AdBlock Plus a particularly important tool for me. I block all ads. And it makes a HUGE difference in my web experience. If for some reason I have to use a computer without Adblock, I really notice it.
If I could apply such a tool to analog media, I would. I'd blot out all billboards. Distill magazines down to the 3 or 4 pages of actual content. It really isn't anything personal against you or your site. I just dislike advertising in general and find that it gets in the way. Even Google text ads.
It isn't wrong. You're free to try to cover costs with ads just as I am free to ignore them.
Again, it is nothing personal.
I wouldn't go so far as to say they are "bad." But I can definitely live without them... and prefer to live without them.
I hardly think that my two eyeballs are worth that much to you and your advertisers. Maybe a few cents per month?
It isn't about "fighting the man." It is about optimizing my browser experience. And block all ads is most optimal (not to mention easier). Sorry.
I'm sure there are people that would like to engage in that discussion. It just isn't me.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
If the site serving the ads does not have to use the bandwidth to serve up the ads, then it costs less when an AdBlock user is viewing the content. Since Firefox/ad blocking are a minority of viewers, the number of ad-blocking users is therefore low. Hence, the majority of non-ad blocking (i.e., well, IE users), they are costing the site more money, while effectively subsidizing the ad-blockers.
Seems quite reasonable and equitable to me.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
I use Firefox, and I have AdBlock installed. However, I have never made it my goal to elliminate ads from my browsing experience entirely, because I do know that I'm affecting a site-owner's revenue. Thus, I only block ads if they actively detract from my experience on a website. This includes popups (which block my view), ads from slow third-party ad servers (which delay the loading of the entire page), and ads which take up a ridiculous amount of page real-estate (don't make me have to scroll down a page to get to the content I want to see!). As long as a website owner uses advertising in accordance with these restrictions, I have no problem with their adverts on the page, as my brain is quite capable of filtering them out without technological assistance anyway.
Drive-by malware installations. Floating ads that block the content until you click on them (with no indication what clicking on them will actually do). Ads that auto-play loud sounds that're highly inappropriate in an office environment. Advertising networks that try to do highly invasive user tracking above and beyond merely displaying an ad. Those are why I block ads, and why I'll continue to block ads. Those ads represent anything from merely a disruption to an outright threat to my system. I can't evaluate them after they've loaded, by then they've already done their thing. The only safe thing I can do is block them from ever loading in the first place. And no, a web site's right to put up ads doesn't trump my right and responsibility to protect my system.
Yes, I'm grouchy. BT,DT,GTTS. The whole line of t-shirts, in fact, in every color variation. Not interested in collecting any more.
Since when is advertising moral?
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Most advertisers use a pay per click model to pay the sites they advertise on. So, if I'm blocking the popups, doesn't that indicate that I am not interested in them and would not have clicked on them anyway?
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
As someone else here has already stated: It's my computer, it's my paid-for connection to the internet, it's my right to see or not see whatever I do or do not want, unless I choose to surrender my ability to choose (e.g., the way Netzero used to be). Personally, I'll rip the damned cable out of the wall myself the day that happens and go back to writing code for entertainment (and yes, I'm aware my rant is starting to reach "Stay off my lawn you damned kids" proportions; I'm taking a step back from the edge now).
If they're grousing about Adblock Plus, I'm sure next they'll be whining about the Flashblock plugin. Not like the over-use of Flash animations on websites has become SPAM 2.0 or anything like that. :p
to want a pleasurable internet experience. I use adblock and flashblock to make sure I don't have to see irritating ads. I let all the simple, non animated ads come right through.
The answer is simple. In order for advertisers to not get their ads blocked, "Don't be a dick!"
Maybe someday they'll realize that by far the biggest ad company got that way by providing text ads. Oh, and useful content too.
seriously suck my dick. I'm not going to punch the monkey, click to win an iPod, or watch your stupid ass tv show because you want to take up 1/2 my screen for 15 seconds at a time. If ads could be just a little more civil I wouldn't mind them as MUCH. I do, however, still remember a time when the web was completely ad-free and I prefer it that way.
You're nothing; like me.
So when advertisers are ready to financially guarantee (with appropriate compensation at, say, $100/hour spent cleaning up each system after an infection) that they won't serve malware and virus-laden ads, we'll be ready to consider actually allowing those ads to be downloaded.
Until then, sayonara..
You make it so that your ad gets by NoScript -- *not* AdBlock, just NoScript -- and you can show me your crummy little ad.
Java? Shockwave? Flash? JavaScript? Pop-ups? Pop-unders? Interstitals? Animation? Tough noogies. You don't ever get to do that on my computer. But you put a text ad or a little picture of something somewhere, and I'm not going to kill myself rushing to block it.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Advertisers count the click through rates, but they are also interested in establishing brand impressions such that you may never click on an advert, but your mind still registers & remembers that impact. So later when you are at the store you might pass by a display and think to yourself that piece of hardware looks cool(will get you laid), is being sold for a reasonable price, the company makes quality products, or whatever bullshit. This is why retailers pipe in elevator music to try to distract shoppers so they linger & make impulse purchases when all you really want to do is buy the one thing you actually need and get the fuck out of there.
Researchers have found that slow tempo muzak can increase sales as much as 38 percent in retail stores because it encourages leisurely shopping.
- marketing
Pervasive commercial advertising, by constantly reinforcing a bogus association between consumption and happiness and by focusing on individual immediate needs, leads to a squandering of resources and stands in the way of a discussion of fundamental societal and long-term needs.
- Sut Jhally
We have the best government that money can buy.
What I see here today is many people frustrated about slow load-up times, wasted bandwidth, annoying flash sounds and so on. I think people are missing the big picture.
Every advertisment is an ill-natured invasion of the mind, an intellectual battery beating you into submission. For them I wouldn't so much use the word "ad", as I would the expression "mind fuck." I might accept your added milliseconds, handfuls of bits or bunches of pixels, but I'm rather keen to keeping my own sanity, thank you very much.
Think ads -- or mind fucks -- don't affect you? Adjusting for scale, by the time you even understand what is going on (if you do), the effect has been made years ago. The old ivory tower -breaking test is very simple: don't think of zebras! Don't -- think -- of -- zebras! See -- you are thinking of zebras. There is simply no escape, except pre-emptive war: adblock.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some penis enlarging to do before I chat with these girls from my area... -->
I have an adblocker installed, but leave it turned off. I only turn it on if I am visiting a site with really intrusive advertising, or a site that lets the ads overwhelm the content. (cover it up, and not go away.) That's maybe 1 or 2 % of the sites I visit. Both indicate bad design, by the web site, or by the advertiser.
If the web sites are worried about this, they should try to remember that they want my business.
Site operators are walking a line here. Advertising pays the bills for them. Nobody advertises on a site with no visitors. Visitors don't come to see the ads. There has to be something else to bring them there. Ads get in the way of the things the visitors want. Some balance is required.
Ad blockers exist because many people believe that the advertisers are way over the line. Some advertisers are. I have had a browser hijacked. I've been annoyed when sound files started that I didn't want by some advertiser. When that happened, the site lost a customer (Are you listening, IBM? Don't auto start ANYTHING, EVER!!!). That's what made me switch from IE to Firefox. now those abusive people want to force me to switch back? NO!!! Remember, you need me, I don't need you.
So, yes there is a war here. The site owners are caught in a crossfire. They need to keep both sides happy, or reasonably so. Antics like the boycott of Firefox will only make sure I don't give that site my business. Look at what suing your customers did for RIAA and SCO. Record sales are off over 30% from the original Napster days. SCO's stock is now worth about 1% of what it was at 5 years ago. That way lies insolvency.
I wonder how a grocery store would do if they didn't allow people to shop there?
Radio stations advertise that they limit their commercial breaks. (3 in a row anybody?) Maybe these web sites should too. After all, why start a war you know you will lose?
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Whereas TiVo users freeload
Fuck you. I pay for satellite TV. When they give me that satellite TV for free for watching the commercials and I still skip them, then you can call it "freeloading". Until then, you can shove your opinion there up your ass...or you can start paying my monthly bill.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
My site has ads. I don't care if people use adBlock on it. I only get revenue from clicks, not from impressions, and people who block ads are also quite likely to be people who never click ads.
I do care about bandwidth hogs, though (stop scanning my site, inktomi slurp! it doesn't update that often! sheesh!)
If they want to put adverts on maybe they should have an entry screen that says "Enter here, content has adverts splattered all over it" and see how many people just choose to go elsewhere.
If you are giving people warning to choose before hand their argument has merit but otherwise as other posts point out, the point of tags allows the client to arrange as recipient requests.
I just won't use sites that bug me with adverts (or requests for survey input!) any more than I have to.
OK, this is really an inane article and I shouldn't dignify it with a response, but I take issue with the author Chris Soghoian on so many levels that I just can't resist.
Chris's blog post is full of sweeping generalizations and inaccuracies
1) 'Web site designers depend upon advertising revenue to pay their bandwidth bills as well as to pay for the staff' - some do, some don't. The fact that this is stated as an absolute makes it fallacious. Some websites pay bandwidth costs themselves (rather than get kickbacks from ad agencies) because they want to promote goods or services; there are a host of 'catalog sites' that do this (funding comes from goods & services changing hands offline). Some pay their own bandwidth because they are hosting an ecommerce site and they want to sell people stuff and accept payment over the internet (again funding doesn't come from kickbacks from ad agencies). Some pay for their own bandwidth and eat the costs because they want to generously contribute content for free to the internet as a whole.
2) 'Every time someone uses advertisement-blocking software . . . they are denying the Web site operator revenue that would otherwise have gone to pay for the bandwidth that is consumed during that browsing session'. As far as I know, this is just not true in most cases. Most webmasters are getting paid for hosting ads on their site in a way that is independent of what the end users of their website do with those ads once they are transmitted to their computers. There may be some correlation between the ad payout and the number of hits on a site, but nothing more granular than that. If a person is surfing and hits an ad based website with firefox & adblock, the webmaster is going to get paid regardless.
3) 'Web advertising skipping technology are far closer to theft than they are to freeloading . . . (most of the article in the middle) . . . a few things are clear: Users of advertisement-skipping technology are essentially engaged in theft of resources.' He makes a claim, he provides no substantiation afterwards as to why the reader should consider his claim to be true, he then reasserts the claim as though he as proved it - this is just bad writing.
Chris is jumping on the moral high ground and claiming that people surfing with adblock are thieves. Then he turns around and suggests that site owners should exploit web browser security holes to punish people. I would contend that hacking people's web browsers is far more unethical. This guy's a hypocrite.
The grey area that Chris talks about can be clarified fairly easily in the following manner. Who owns the physical media on which the 1's & 0's constituting the data reside? Whoever owns the physical media owns the data that resides on it. So yes, the website owner owns the data for his website when it is resident on his servers. He is within his rights to do anything that he wishes with that data. He can change it, delete it or (as Chris suggests) refuse to transmit it to users surfing with firefox and adblock.
Conversely, the surfer owns all of the data on his machine. He is within his rights to copy it, erase it, flip all the 1's and 0's or not to display the ads embedded within the data. It's his hard drive, his RAM, his monitor, his pixels, his power. He can do whatever he wants with his general purpose computer. It is his property.
The propaganda that emanates from large corporations these days reeks more and more of restrictions on freedoms after a thing is bought (or given away). Copying a song which you have purchased is theft. Editing out the commercials on a video tape that you own is freeloading. Choosing not to display an online advertisement on your computer is immoral and a theft of resources. How long will it be until we are told that it is a theft of resources to press the mute button while an advertisement is playing on TV or that we have violated an end use agreement and are stealing because we fold a newspaper so that we can read the art
friends don't let friends teleport drunk
There should be an option to not just block the images, but to "click" on them as well, so that websites you like can get the money from the advertisers.
Morality? It's a bit late for capitalism to start whining about that.
So if my browser isn't capable of displaying your ads, is that theft?
Lets look at another aspect. By blocking their ads, the visitor isn't using more of the web site operators bandwidth. He's actually saving him some bandwidth. If we look at most ads on the Internet, they contain graphics, and those graphical images consume more bandwidth than text.
Now, lets take a look at yet another aspect. Why do people block ads? They block them because they're intrusive and annoying. Not all of them are. Some are static images or text ads, and there are quite a few people who are fine with that. However, some marketers decided to not play nice and screwed it up for those who do wish to play nice.
It's fairly obvious that the business model is flawed. Web site operators who depend on this type of business model is destined to fail and they should seek other ways to gain revenue. If they don't want people blocking ads to visit their web site, that's their choice. At the same time, it's the visitors choice to block the ads. The approach Danny Carlton took not only limits the visitors he'll get, but it can potentially bring him even less revenue. If he doesn't want that precious bandwidth he pays for to be used freely, as it should be, he should change his site to be subscription-based, thus requiring registration and an agreement that registered visitors are to disable ad blocking software.
He's targeting Firefox because he feels they're endorsing ad blocking because AdBlock Plus is a featured add-on to the browser. He wants a method to disable the add-on when people visit his site. The people that make AdBlock Plus didn't comply, so he took it a step further by blocking all Firefox users. What he fails to realize is almost all browsers today offer this type of functionality, including IE7 with IEPro, another featured add-on to the Microsoft web browser.
Yes, bandwidth does cost money. The server costs money. The electricity to run the server costs money. The air conditioning unit to keep the server cool costs money. However, all of this was his choice when he started the web site, and he also chose the flawed business model to support it.
AdBlock offers detection code on their site:
http://www.adblock.org/2004/07/adblock_detection_script/
I'm sure that sites who object to Adblock could use this code to flag to users or block them when it is active - I don't want to be blocked just because I don't use IE - I'd like to have the option to turn off Adblock if they insist, rather than having my choice of web browser completely blocked by their site...
I never thought about using ad-blocking techniques - not even when they started moving - I even punched the monkey once... but when freakin' flash sites started moving OVER the sites i wanted to see and the F***ING [X] Button redirected me to the advertised site, THAT WAS TOO MUCH...
It's not immoral to block such crap - its immoral to force such crap on users!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
"they are denying the Web site operator revenue" I call bullshit. The author made the poor assumption that a person visiting the website will click on Ads and buy something. Detecting a browser or extensions may get rid of "free loaders" and cut down on a little bandwidth, but it isn't going to pay the bills or instil any good will with potential visitors.
I have no moral obligation to conform my behaviour to someone else's business model. Trying to forcibly alter a potential customer's behaviour to fit your business model is, at best, annoying or, more likely, simply doomed to failure. This isn't just about web advertising, I could just as easily be talking about, say, retail stores built like a rat maze (I'm looking at YOU Ikea).
I hate to say this, but turnabout is fair play, morons. Remember 1999? 2000? Pop-ups? Pop-UNDERS? Pop-ups that spawn other pop-ups when closed? On-close pop-ups?
:P /end rant.
Yeah. I think it's time you got what you all had coming to you. had you behaved and no started up with the overly-intrusive ads, we wouldn't be here right now. Take your medicine and like it, bastards.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
browser. dom. document. all. disabled
value "false".
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
first morals implies that you are doing something you know to be wrong by blocking ads.
second, I don't pay attention to banner ads or other site advertisements. Since I don't pay attention to them, I block them.
The benefits for me outweigh any potential loss by the site.
By blocking the advertisements, I am saving the site owner potential losses by wasting throughput of the ads on me which I won't click on to begin with.
So, the ad blocking is a win-win for us both. I also employ ip-based blocking of known advertising servers. I also employ kaspersky ad blocking.
This is the age of the informed consumer. Blind advertisement doesn't cut it anymore. I'd rather read about new products in a review on a website of my choosing.
And to those site owners who disagree, you did it to yourselves! you can go ahead and punch the monkey.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Some sites, like NY times etc., "time out" after a week or so... you can view recent stories,
but older ones are unavailable (for free).
I have noticed that if you use User Agent Switcher to pose as the googlebot, you can see these
older stories anyway.
So... how unethical is it to masquerade as another agent?
These type of negative articles written by nervous advertisers are self defeating in their nature. The bloggers (almost always working for ad-supported sites) try to spread FUD about "the doom of the internet as we currently know it" because they see ABP becoming a threat to THEIR current business model. Well, I say that "the doom of the internet as we currently know it" may be the best thing to ever happen to the web. Most of us were using the internet to escape the bombardment of advertisement in almost every aspect of our daily lives. It was very nice. Then someone, somewhere found that if he put up an ad, he could hope to make a little money when bandwidth and hosting a site was fairly expensive. Well, those things cost next to nothing now but greedy people want to use the web MAINLY to make money from their sites advertising. What started out to be a simple ad on a site turned into pure greed as many webmasters have loaded their sites with as many ads as they can find onto their sites. I find it interesting (but not surprising) is that the people who are actually writing most of the negative articles about ABP are bloggers. That is like someone walking into the middle of a public place and demanding that everyone there pay him one dollar apiece to listen to his opinions on things. This is not to say that I don't enjoy reading some blogger's opinions (I do), I just don't think that they have the right to set any terms for listening to their opinions of things. The users' "comments" to a web article are as much a part of that site's content as the guy who wrote an opinion .... what do those people get in return? They get no part of that income and have to put up with the ads even though they contribute to the site as much as the article's author has with their OWN opinions. Complaining that contributers to your site are thieves because they aren't viewing your ads is absolutely insane. Do you find a site with an article with no replies very good? It just looks like another "lost" opinion in a sea of personal opinions. Opinions are like azzholes, folks .. everyone has one. Some are entertaining, but I certainly don't think someone has the right to be paid BECAUSE of one(like mine here)!
On another note, advertisers have have been ramming advertisements down users' throats for a while now ... not to mention trying to find out everything about a user possible and to track their every move along the way. People have just decided that they do NOT like advertising's business model anymore and now have the technology to do something about it. The web has actually become worse than television is some ways. As least with TV, you only have to see one ad at a time. It's not advertising that is the problem ... it's OVER-advertising, OVER-pushing it, and simply OVER-doing everything that is possible to do on the web from that point of a business perspective. "Annoy them, trick them, pound them until they click on something .. either by accident or on purpose".
I also find it puzzling that these stories are afraid of a plugin that is used in about 1% of the world's computers. All of these articles, good or bad, only increases awareness of ABP and download numbers get bigger. Large companies do not even discuss ABP openly because they are only 2 conclusions that can be drawn:
1. ABP works great!
2. ABP is bad because it works great! ... and most users really hate ads (and that's a fact!). ..... rick 752 (author of the EasyList for Adblock Plus)
At least this tells the marketers that enough is enough. When the ad - be it bop some star, win an ipod, or even a video - completely detracts from the content of the website, then I have a problem with it. I wouldn't mind non-motion ads that don't distract. However just about every single site that I have viewed without some kind of ad blocker is very obnoxious. I don't know who is at fault but if the websites who live off of this content want advertising dollars, they might consider changing their style of ads. Google leads the way with non-obtrusive ads and I don't mind their text based ads.
In any case I don't mind "freeloading" if they don't mind putting 500 moving/distracting messages in front of me. I don't think I'm immoral for doing so - this is just the latest way to communicate back to sites and advertisers that they've gone too far. They can take this however they wish - including giving people a guilt trip, but the reality is that people obviously are starting to avoid their ads in whatever way, so change your model/ads or go out of business.
Well it also has code which redirects you if it detects your javascript DOM doesn't support special IE add ons (one more reason we need a standard browser scripting language, not this browser dependent crap).
What I would like would be a plugin that would just ask me before it redirects me somewhere. That would be useful in many other situations (yes, I can block redirects entirely, but I would prefer it to simply open a dialog like it does for cookies).
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
And you, in turn, have missed mine. It seems we're all even now.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Lawyers love your type.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Why doesn't this guy advocate blocking all web browsers that include a pop up blocker? A pop up blocker's purpose is to block advertising.
I don't think the comparison to newspapers is valid at all. Even if you ignore all the ads, they're still there. You can't order a copy of the newspaper with ads removed, for obvious reasons. Actually, I'd say the newspaper comparison only serves to help the case of website publishers. Websites do put in their terms of use that the content is not to be altered; they just don't have the advantage of an immutable medium that newspapers have. I'd have to disagree, then, with your argument about works of paper not having the protection--if you remove stuff from your books and newspapers, you've still had to look at it, or at the very least you'd see all the words crossed out or the clipping missing. And ignoring something is not the same as that thing never having existed to begin with.
Google and Slashdot don't block people because they can't do it without blocking a huge amount of people who don't block the ads. If they had a way to determine who was blocking ads, you'd be those people would be out in a millisecond.
Now, I don't want to be construed by any means as someone who actually likes ads. I hate them with a passion, and it pisses me off when the websites I go to have horribly programmed flash ads that cover the content and don't give up the real estate like they're supposed to, or they open a pseudo-popup window right on top of the content. But it's their right to have it there, and all it means is that my interest thresshold has to go up a bit.
In the end, a few things are clear: Users of advertisement-skipping technology are essentially engaged in theft of resources.
TFA assumes the position that if a website gets a nickel for placing an ad on MY computer, and I have a mechanism in place to prevent that ad from getting to MY computer, that I am engaged in theft of resources.
This is like saying if someone gets a nickel for every time someone else can park their car in MY driveway, and I install a gate to prevent that third party from parking their car in MY driveway, that I am engaged in theft of resources.
Website operators have no right to bitch and moan if I block their ads from MY computer, because while they insist that I am stealing if I do not permit their ads to invade MY computer, they are not offering to pay me rent or other compensation for the use of MY CPU, MY RAM, MY bandwidth, MY desktop, MY browser, or even MY electricity for sending me unwanted and unrequested material.
Seven or eight years ago I went through hell with IE in Win98, because there were sites that spawned pop-up ads, and those ads spawned MORE pop-up ads as the first ads were closed, and then the other ads were busy spawning even more ads, until the only thing I could do was hit the switch and turn the damn machine off cold. That's when I learned the magic art of disabling scripts. I cannot have been the only one.
Thanks!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I use adblock to block every ad that I can. I've done this for so long now, that when I recently ran IE, I realised my whole view of the web had changed. Under IE, the web is slow, full of sound, glittery lights and irrelevant moving pictures. Compare this the view I usually get of quick loading pages that only contain the information I was looking for.
It's good to know the guys that want to enlarge my penis and hook me up with sexy singles care so much about morality.
--
Exactly. The user has no obligations. What crazy planet are you from where TCP/IP, peering agreements and ISPs work differently? When you put up a website, you are putting a SERVER out on the public internet which means you are making a calculated risk with known costs. Before you even lay out that initial month's payment you better have a fucking plan to make money that goes beyond serving banner ads.
The burden is _entirely_ with you to figure out how to make money from giving away data. You can't make any hard assumptions about user client behavior, only aggregate assumptions. Right now your stats have to assume the impression rate is much lower than before AdBlock (and similar tools) were popular.
Just because you're a webmaster and you're doing all this work doesn't necessarily mean your entitled to payment unless you're a salaried employee of a larger organization. The majority of webmasters who can live off their jobs maintain websites which are overall cost centers in their businesses which are not web-oriented. These websites DON'T make money directly; they enable the business the website is attached to make more money than they would without it.
But if you're going to go your own and make money purely through a website, unless you're selling a product or selling access, it's INCREDIBLY difficult.
You must deploy measures to deter non-money making uses of your resources, or only serve content to authenticated or paying users. Or be so insanely popular that advertisers throw money at your feet to appear up by your title line (Penny Arcade, Digg, etc.)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
But I never click banner ads anyway, no matter how relevant they are. They're chaff, and adblock or not, I automatically ignore them. When I download an ad while browsing, I waste both my bandwidth and the server's, and so it's just as well I don't download them at all and save everyone the trouble. Since practically EVERY advertising effort online is per-click anyway, they just don't make money from me.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Use Adblock Plus instead. It's Adblock, plus automatic updating of filters, plus tweaked to be more powerful. I have had to manually adjust Adblock settings about twice since I installed it.
Also use NoScript, which prevents execution of javascript except from whitelisted servers, and with the option of temporary whitelisting for the current session. Whitelisting is not laborious: it involves two mouse-clicks. I resisted installing NoScript for a long time, as I thought Adblock Plus by itself ought to be enough, but now that I've got it I will never, ever be getting rid of it.
Some people also advocate FlashBlock, but any Flash that makes it past the above two add-ons is almost certainly Flash that I want to see.
If that's the case I'll just surf the Google cache, which doesn't have google ads, and an ad-blocker for those cached advertising elements.
Better yet, just have these people host *their* site on Google apps, which is free.
After all, it's not as if us anti-ad nazi's are going to pay for shit we find advertised on a website we browse to on a non ad-blocked computer. We'll just bitch and moan and probably hate that product for getting its grubby message all over our eyeballs.
What a dumb question. If your answer is anything but "no, it is not theft", then you are implying that we are obligated to look at stuff we don't want to look at. Absolutely ridiculous. Are you stealing if you are in IE and you don't glance at every ad? What if you just glance but don't click or at least consider clicking?
Seriously, this story is almost as dumb as the facebook "hate group" story. What bothers me is that the OP surely thought he was stimulating intelligent dialog (but then one wonders why (s)he came here).
If a web site implements this type of thing, then by default the web site is telling you that when "it loads that it's going to resize my browser, install software and watch everything I do" and therefore makes the decision for you not to visit it. I herald this as a new feature of AdBlock and/or Firefox which keeps the user from viewing annoying web pages. P.S. If you come across such a site, and really want to piss off the anal retentive, asshole webmaster, set up a script to reload the site every couple of seconds and run it for a while. That surely should burn up any of the bandwidth savings. And then post the script and the site on slashdot and say "go at it guys". I have a feeling most sites that would implement firefox filtering could quickly succumb to the slashdot effect (or DDOS if you will).
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
Might I recommend Adblock Plus (has integrated filter updates)? :)
I don't see ads, ever. HTH
It's not that banner ads (or other types for that matter) are the problem, but it's the intrusive nature of many ads. Flashing, annoying ads...ads that are not appropriate for the context...ads that masquerade as legit ads that ultimately lead to spreading malware. It's not the ad in itself, but the abuse of ads that makes it a problem. I run a Web site (JimsTips.com) and I do depend on Google ads to pay the bills. But the ads are not intrusive. And when I surf, though I admit that I do use AdBlock Plus, I do not block any Google ads. I'm very selective about what I block. Maybe that's hypocritical, but I see it as targeting the "bad" ads and favoring the "good" ones.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
If people people are that fanatic about making everyone see ads, they have an easy solution -- turn all their web pages into images. Or push all the content into Flash. Or use PDFs.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
...as opposed to being STUPID consumers of ads.
There aren't really very many web pages with ads on them, at least since I installed Adblock.
I spent my time posting this comment, with the expectation that you would send me $10 in return.
I'm waiting.
I find them distracting. I have trouble reading with jumping ads.
qz
Suppose I am driving on the highway and there is a billboard. I decide that I don't want to view this particular billboard; so I hold my hand up to obscure my view of the billboard. Granted, the person whose ad is on that billboard may have spent a lot of money developing the ad and paying the owner of the billboard to display the ad at that location. But that does not take away my right to choose to not view the billboard. And it certainly does not give the advertiser the right to force me to lower my hand and view his/her advertisement.
The same holds true for the web ad. I don't feel that there is any moral issue here.
Advertising always was and always will be a gamble. Just like the billboard advertiser, the web advertiser needs to consider the content and placement of his/her ad. If you, as an advertiser, want to maximize the probability that I won't block your web ad, there are 2 things that you can do: 1. don't make an annoying ad. 2. don't place your ad on a web-site that has annoying ads.
If I block your ad, it doesn't mean that I'm immoral. It means that you are a poor advertiser.
For conceding the point.
Basically this is just a case of providing something at no or reduced price, because as a side effect you are benefiting. There has been no promise that good things will be guaranteed to you as a result, but in the past that's how it's worked out. This does not constitute a guarantee nor a promise. Yesterday I took a cab to work, today I'm going to walk. That doesn't mean I'm stealing something from the cabbie today.
A man in the park sets out a basket full of roses and sets up a camera a short distance away, he is a professional photographer that wants some pictures of random good looking gals picking up the roses and smiling. An ugly hag strolls up and takes a flower. Did she just steal from him? He didn't get what he wanted and provided something free in exchange for nothing. Oh the thief! Same thing.
if you provide something free as "bait" so that you benefit by some indirect means, and some people decide they don't want you to have that benefit but still take your bait, it does not change the fact that you are giving something away. There was no contract made and you freely gave something away. Quit complaining.
Theft in this variation requires there to be an agreement between two parties for an equitable exchange, where one party delivers and the other fails to deliver. Or when one party fails to enter into the agreement and takes from the other what was only offerend under conditions. And here I think lies the problem - it's hard to draw a line where a contract has been formed. The seller usually wants to benefit from the openness of no contact to help his image which will improve his trade, but on the other hand does not like having create the possibility of giving something away when he will get anything in return. You can't have it both ways. You either give something away without requiring compensation, or you don't. If the trade you're interested in is not practical to prevent me from not giving you what you want in exchange, then you are doing something wrong. That's like setting cases of pop on the street with a pail beside it for people to drop their 50c into as they pick up cans of pop, and then coming back an hour later and being pissed off that there's little or nothing in the pail and all the pop's gone. Don't be mad at the public. You did something stupid. If you go to the police station and ask them to post guards or arrest people that are walking by and snag a can, you are working on the wrong end of the problem. (think "vending machine", there is the proper solution to the problem)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Well, my Adblock extension wasn't blocking customeracquisitionsite.com (I'm not using autoupdated block lists, perhaps I should). But, since CNET uses them to serve ads and they use cookies, they came to my attention and were added to my block list.
Thank you CNET!
When a website uses my bandwidth to transfer data I don't want, they're stealing from me.
It's immoral to call it "stealing" when I'm protecting a resource I pay for. That's good economic sense, not "stealing".
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Gee - If I look away from a TV ad - should I pray for forgiveness ..
Get Real!
I was given to understand that this is exactly how AdBlock operates: Your browsers goes ahead and fetches the blocked content, it is simply not displayed.
In other words, the advertiser sees you downloaded the ad, but has no idea whether it shows up on your screen.
The best of both worlds.
splunge (n) -- A good idea.. but it could be lousy... and I'm not being indecisive!
after some days ...
.. okay,
Okay
you can block my advert. but please atleast accept my cookie
but you know the banner adds just take away from the internet, if they wernt so annoying and irelivant people wouldn't turn them off ! I mean i know i am not the 100,000 visitor 4 times in a row, nor do i need some windows program.
maybe advertisers should learn that it is infact them who are driving the customers away.
couldn't add blocker make it look like the add was getting surved then the only "losers" are the company who surve up the adds we hate so much.
Here's a few counter arguments:
- What if I live in a country where your advertised products/services are not available, or are too expensive because of the exchange rate?
- The way I understand online advertising, mere clicking on ads does not help; one has to buy the product for the website to get credit from its advertisers.
In short, what if online advertising is completely irrelevant to me?What if I don't ever buy any stuff online?(In my case, I don't own an international credit card)
What's the point of trying to convert me to not block ads? I'm never going to buy anything online anyway.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
No need for the scare quotes around broken. The business model is: everyone will look at our ads, so we make money. Users aren't looking at the ads, so the model is broken. That's the way it works. A different model could be: a lot of people will look at our ads, some because they don't know how to block them, some because they support our site that way, we also sell subscriptions with added benefits and t-shirts and other stuff.
Am I stealing from Penny Arcade because I haven't bought any of their t-shirts? Am I stealing from Toyota when I go to a dealer and get informed about one of their cars but decide to buy a Porsche instead? (Had to get the car analogy in there)
The answer is no. It's not no, but... It's just no.
Remember, when people aren't making money with their business model and rant about how users are immoral, it's a clear sign of bullshit.
These days more and more people are using their mobile phones to browse the net. Especially now with Safari on the iPhone, you can browse full fledged websites. Mobile users who aren't on an 'all you can eat' plan have to pay for every freaking byte that they download (Is it the same with the iPhone on AT&T?) ALL THE MORE REASON to block ads that one doesn't want to see!! A mobile browser is anyway slower and has a smaller display than a desktop browser; why should I waste my screen space AND pay for bandwidth for such ads?
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
TiVo users are freeloading? Blocking ads is theft? Please.
This whole thing is such BS. I love websites who try to say that you have some kind of agreement with them to see the ads. See here's the thing. I don't get to see this supposed use policy or agreement until after I have visited the site. I have to go there to see it.
Thus it has no standing. There is absolutely NO requirement for me to view ads. I have not entered into any agreement with any website or TV network which compels me under penalty of anything to view ads.
Having said that, I understand their situation. They need to generate income to help fund the site. I get that. However, even if you think you can say that by using the site I agree to view ads in some "policy" or t&c... I would laugh at you. You don't put up a splash page that says I have to agree to this before I see the page (which would be utterly stupid) - so to see this thing I supposedly agreed to, I would have to dig into your site to find it. LOL
Yea nice try.
The fact is that the majority of folks won't block ads, so they'll still get revenue in some way.
The thing is, that people who have a public website out on the 'net are doing the same thing as radio, tv, newspaper, etc. They are broadcasting information for people to consume in their homes. If I were to cut ads out of the newspaper, plug my ears during radio commercials... or channel surf during TV commercials... it amounts to the same thing. Adblock and the like just makes it easier- complimentary to the fact that the web makes it easier to get that information. These complainers will have to accept it as a cost of providing web content. If they don't like it, they can slap a password on the content and charge a subscription fee.
What makes me laugh is they are worrying about losing the attention of visitors who are in the demographic less likely to be attracted by annoying ads in the first place. They should be hoping their content is good enough that the adblock using visitors will spread the word to other non-adblock-using people.
Call me a communist if you like, but I fail to see the merits of this reasoning. The internet is a public space, IMO - and just like I object to being forced to look at all-dominating, tacky adverts on all the beautiful, historical buildings in Central London, I object to being force-fed intrusive adverts from mostly dishonest companies every time I access a web-site. I would much rather be without it, even if it means that 90% of the web isn't viable any more.
And just like I mentally shut out adverts on building or switch channel when the adverts start, I will continue to avoid looking at them on the internet. I am not against companies trying to earn an honest buck, but the crucial word here is HONEST. Apart from that, I don't believe that people buy because of adverts - or at least not the kind of adverts you mostly see; the 'research' may say that we do, but who is it that actually pays for this 'research'? I have only seen one article about the effects of advertising, that was certifiably independently funded - its conclusion was that after the age of 30 people would as a rule simply ignore adverts. The explanation is that people think before they buy - first they realise that they need to buy an item, then they look for where they can get it and compare prices, then they buy. In other words, to most people, most of the time, most adverts are simply irrelevant noise or, even worse, an irritation.
Think about that for a moment - would you buy Coca Cola if they advertised in a way that constantly pissed you off? Fortunately there is a practical limit to how many cubic meters of junk mail you are likely to receive, but not so on the internet; if we don't block advertising, browsing will simply become a nightmare where we have little or no control over what happens on our computer. The sad fact is that we can't trust the advertisers to respect us and allow us a reasonable amount of personal space.
If I choose to not look at a billboard am I stealing from the advertiser ?
If I choose to not read my junk mail am I stealing from the people who sent it to me ?
Short answer, no.
At the end of the day this is advertising, where someone pays for their message to be placed where you could see it and may look at it.
If you choose to not look or prevent yourself from seeing it that is your own free will.
The only exception is where you have entered into a contract where viewing of the advertising is required.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
...do they?
So some people are saying it doesn't matter wether you are interested in the ads or not, you shouldn't block them because that way, the webmaster will get paid for his efforts.
But doesn't that just shift the load to the advertiser? If you are going to shove the ads down the throats of people who don't want to see them, but charge the advertiser the same amount as for the people who are willing to look at some ads - isn't that the same morality?
"i take what i can as long as he can't do anything about it"
Just a thought...
I once tried to sell a bicycle to a friend of mine. It was sweet! Had a banana seat, it was dark, metallic blue. The tires on it were nearly brand-new! I needed a 10-speed but me and this ol' bike had had some good days. It also (these were the days when having them wasn't so weird as I guess it is nowadays) had a bell on the handle. I'd bought that with my own paper-route monies and it was pretty useful in reminding errant pets that I had a job to do and to please move along.
I wanted $25 for this bike. It was used, after all. And that's how much I needed to effect a transfer of my bike ownership from this one to the new 10-speed I was to buy. I thought that a very fair price and included the bell!
Well, Timmy wasn't at all interested in the bell. Said if I'd sell for $20 I could keep the bell. I told him I *needed* to sell it *with* the bell and for $25. I pointed out all the advantages of the bell. I asked him to come over and *see* the bell. I rang it for him and it made this sweet ringing you could hear all down the street. I even showed him the package it came in with its guarantee.
Despite all this effort, my cost, and all the flashiness, well, Timmy just wasn't interested. All I could do was keep the bell and wait just a bit longer before I could buy my 10-speed. It was a pain walking the route for awhile, but I adjusted.
I guess you'd have to say I learned a lesson from that.
Buyer Beware implies Seller Beware.
I've said it before, I'll say it again:
If your business model doesn't work, go do something else.
People whining they can't make money on the web remind me of the old joke, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this..."
I live in South Africa and except for having some of the slowest internet connections in the WORLD, I also pay $40 for 3GB (excl my ISP cost of $20 for a 384kb line)...and that is WOW!! It cost me more to display the add then the advertiser is willing to pay the web page owner!!! So ethically speaking, they are stealing MY bandwith, that I pay for! Beat that!
The main reason I installed adblock was page load times. Many sites I visit use ad servers of some sort. They WAY overload those servers, making the ad loads VERY VERY slow. I noticed when I was waiting on a page that was slow, it was invariably an ad. So I installed Adblock. Lo and behold, all those slow pages load quite fast fron the hosting servers. I did a test of a couple of key sites, and page load without adblock was from 12-30 seconds. With adblock, 2-3 seconds. You do the math. If you aren't running adblock, you have plenty of spare time to work it out.
Welcome to the monetization of everything. I should charge bystanders every time I fart, since the emitted gas is likely a valuable energy resource. Seriously, tho... Maybe instead of trying to club people over the head with a business model they find annoying, maybe one should just come up with a new model that makes people want to do business with one.
MORALITY? So blocking objectionable material--whatever the source, and whatever the possible (negative) consequences for viewing it--is now immoral? Child porn is immoral. Murder is immoral. Incest is immoral. But exercising freedom of choice in what I view--so long as what I view isn't immoral--is not a question of morality.
WAY back in the early days of the graphics driven internet I used to use a filtering program called PROXIMITY to filter web sites for me. This was to change background colors, fonts, remove items to speed up page loading as I was on a dial up connection, etc., all strictly for my own viewing pleasure. Then X started their pop up/under cam campaign. I started filtering that out with Proximity. As ads became more prevalent I had to adjust the filtering more so my meager bandwidth wouldn't be overwhelmed When cable connections became available I continued to filter ads out as I was now able to do some serious multi-tasking. When Proximity's author dropped support for the program some of it's users banded together, created their own support network, and began writing filters for everyone to use. This worked great for a few years. I started using the Marathon browser a few years ago and found that I could accomplish the same filtering with that program. About that time FIrefox became available with plug-ins for ad-blocking.
// A // S // T and use little memory. For this reason, I continue, and will always continue, to block all ads.
Currently, I have an 8 MB/Sec internet connection and letting ads load is no longer much of a bandwidth issue. However, I've become quite comfy with nice, clean, ad-free pages that load F
Doyle
I'm waiting for WOOT to offer an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator. I need one.
...then shouldn't the websites be paying me when I'm forced to download the advertisements they are hosting? Under my current ISP's scheme, if I download more than a GB per month I pay for every extra MB, per MB. And all that pretty flash animation does take up space, doesn't it?
Are you implying that it would not be legal for me to buy a newspaper, dissect it in any fashion I wish, and resell some of the parts?
That seems unlikely. Marking up textbooks and reselling them is fairly common...
I go through my comics list every now and then and hit the paypal buttons too.
Again, the newspaper analogy doesn't hold up well. I guess the biggest factor here is that you actually paid for the newspaper to begin with. They don't send everybody newspapers for free. You pay for text books to begin with as well. In addition, advertisers can know how many copies of the newspaper were sold, and pay based on that.
I was thinking of the free ad-supported newspapers. Go grab one from the box.
They expect that you'll want to read it, but it's legal to take one and use it as a bird-cage liner.
I'm still seeing a very strong similarity here. They give something away hoping you'll look at ads, but don't have a way to make skipping ads illegal. They can try to distribute the paper/page only to those who will read it (not to people with ad blockers) but unless they make you promise up front to read the whole thing (a valid and enforceable contract), you're free to skip any pieces you wish.
In general, you can't force someone to do something just because just because you want them to. If I sell you a sled and you decide to burn it for warmth instead of sledding on my hill ($$) I've made a bad investment, but you've done nothing illegal.
The analogy is still lacking. If you go to the box with the free newspapers and you start clipping out the ads before anyone even gets the chance to see them (or somebody else clips them out before you read it), I think there's a problem. There's a difference between ignoring the ads and blocking the ads from even displaying in the first place. I suspect there's no legal problem with adblocking, but this topic is about the morality of ad blocking.
If not, I challenge you to draw a real distinction between manually ignoring ads and automating the process with software.
:)
Depends on how you're defining 'ignoring'. If it downloads and your eyes are simply trained to not see it? *shrugs* Fine with me. CPM is on my side.
"Ignoring" by using automated software usually means you're actively blocking and preventing the advertisers from having a chance to get their message out, which is what they're paying me for. That's the freeloading part.
Unfortunately, I'm not going to bother rebutting any of your other responses, because reading through the other discussions here, there's really no argument against blind self-entitlement. I'll simply go as far as to say I disagree with you, as I'm sure at least 95% of other non-blog site developers/publishers would. Please stay off my site -- nothing personal.
[DISCLAIMER: This post is a work of satire and should not be misconstrued as a holy text upon which to base a religion.]