Slashdot Mirror
Will Mainstream Media Embrace Adblockers?
Blarkon writes "Slashdotters are aware of and often use Adblock Plus," and notes that
"if newspapers wanted to hit the online content industry hard right now, they would be running non-stop information about how to obtain and use Adblock Plus.' That a scorched-earth approach to blocking Internet advertising through AdBlock Plus might collapse free online competitors by starving them of revenue. If more people are aware of Adblock plus, it will be more tempting for other browser manufacturers to include similar ad blocking functionality. Might Rupert Murdoch's apparent 'traffic killing' move to paywall content be a desperate gamble to avoid the impact of a future crash in the ad-supported online business model caused by everyone's browser including something like Adblock Plus?"
Users have shown that they will not pay for online content unless there is an actual value-add. News sites provide nothing that can't be eventually seen on TV or read elsewhere.
Newspapers are done. Trumpeting AdBlock isn't going to help them make a cent.
We're all friends here, right?
Also, the online medias fail to remember that any void they leave behind, the internet will never fail to fill in. Free news isn't all that hard to find.
If/Once Ad-Block becomes mainstream, companies will further and further integrate advertisements into the content. A good example is to look at how YouTube has ads baked into the flash.
News and other ad-supported information sites would take steps such as inserting an ad jingle or statement in the middle of a paragraph.
There will always be un-configured browsers, users who don't know, and people who don't care. Will that be enough to keep advertising profitable? I don't know.
I do know that running an ad blocker is a hell of a lot simpler than having to circumvent a retarded paywall.
Its only a matter of time before they figure out how to circumvent adblocking software. The more that use it, the more likely it will be that they'll find a way around it.
Sounds like someone schilling Ad Block Plus. it is such a deterrent people are scared of Ad block Plus. Content providers seeing their ad revenues decline because of Ad Block Plus. Aliens deterred from attacking Earth due to Ad Block Plus.
In general, the people who have an up-to-date browser and have an ad-blocker don't click on ads. And in general most ads are paid per click rather than per impression, meaning that they are losing no money when someone has ad-block plus installed because they wouldn't have clicked on the ads.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
why not put ad-block on the router itself, you could then enable it for a whole organization.
Look at paid cable service channels. Almost all those channels have ads. So would the paid news sites, I expect.
We should stop talking about ad blockers. If a majority of people start blocking ads, then a majority of websites will start finding ways around them.
The first rule of ad blockers is the same as the first rule of that other thing.
So 1 percent of us geeks use Adblock - who cares? It would be a waste of their efforts to try and work around us.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This summary is so much worse than anything I've ever seen here before. Let's try to standardize the name of the plugin (it's "Adblock Plus", by the way, not "ad block plus" or "Ad Block plus"), and remove the sentence fragment in the middle. Thanks!
I think Adblock may do more harm than good. With all the major browsers moving towards HTML 5, advertisers will have many more opportunities to inject intrusive advertising into web content with simple CSS commands. We have already seen CSS-layer popups that require JavaScript to be enabled to make them go away -- which then allows the other ads to display.
At some point these industries have to make money, and they only make money from advertising. There has to be a decent middle ground here.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
...had advertisers not become so obnoxious. There is no going back. They did this to themselves.
There is little to no revenue being lost though. Most people who have a decent browser with adblock won't click ads, most ads are paid by click, not by impression. So there is no profit lost.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Do you mind non-obnoxious ads from sites you actually like? Me neither, they're just fine.
What to do:
1. Make your ads not a goddamn pain in the arse.
2. Gently ask adblock-using readers to add your site to their whitelist. DON'T MAKE THIS A POPUP, THAT'S DOING IT WRONG.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
This sounds like a slashvertisement.
Firefox users should give NoScript a try, it does a lot more than just block ads.
IE users should give Firefox a try.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
...when you stop trying to hijack my autonomic nervous system by building ads that writhe, squirm and strobe insistently in my peripheral vision. That is, when they aren't flinging gobs of DHTML poop right on top of the content that I'm actually trying to read.
I feel that I have an unwritten contract with content providers: you provide me with content I want, and in exchange I'll tolerate the ads. That's the quid-pro-quo, and I'm very happy with it. It's better than paying money.
If the ads are so intrusive that they're intolerable, I'll go elsewhere. Effectively, I "can't afford" that content.
I reckon using an ad blocker is *directly* equivalent to circumventing a micropayment mechanism.
Has it ever occurred to you that some of us know about Adblock and still don't use it, because we want to see the ads? Stupid discussion. Next.
I'm sorry but 2 or 3 animated flash ads are not unobtrusive. They make the page load slowly and take huge resources to run all the flash player instances. Some websites bring low performance machines (like netbooks) to a halt if you don't use adblock.
Mada mada dane.
You block my ads, I sneak them past your adblocker. You adjust your adblocker, I adjust my ads.
It's not going to "solve" the "problem" of free internet information by making it unprofitable. Instead, we'll see more sophisticated means to get past blockers. It's always been that way, from spam and spamblockers to P2P and P2Pblocking. You filter spam, the spammer changes his approach to make it past your filter. Your ISP filters P2P, you create/download ways to get past that filter.
My solution was simply to "educate" advertisers. Your ads are obnoxious and in-your-face popups/popuners/flashcrap? You get blocked. Your ads are unobtrusive and targeted? I go out of my way and click it to generate revenue for you and show you (and the one advertising with your page) that this is a "working" way to get ads clicked.
The key here is that ads have to be seen, but they must not be disturbing. If I have to close 20 popups when I surf to your place, I might just take my "business" elsewhere. If you offer information with a few good, topical ads, I might just as well click it, either because I'm actually really interested in what you're offering or just to show you that yes, I do honor your way to advertise and I think you deserve your money for playing fair.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Print is basically dead at this point. Online companies can find other ways to make money because they sell a product people want. Not so for print media.
What's the point of printing information about Ad Block, since the users you want to target are on the web and rarely look at print? Are web ads really that annoying? I don't use any blocker, and I get around just fine.
He would indeed look into alternatives like add-block for his paywall.
Mr.Murdoch makes most of his money by means of propaganda, political cloud and manipulation.
The paywall will freeze his propaganda channel as he will lose a lot of eyeballs.
With that he can lose a lot of money and thus political cloud and manipulation room.
If I were him, I would leave that paywall idea go and think of alternatives.
The problem is intrusiveness, and we're in a nasty downward spiral of trying to outdo each other.
People didn't care about ads until they started getting really intrusive, taking up way too much real estate, blinking, shaking... so people started blocking them. So the advertisers, instead of toning them down, made them even more intrusive.... and now people go to greater lengths to block them, with uninformed users caught in the middle.
I don't know how to solve the impasse... if we weren't clicking on enough ads then, we certainly won't be in the future, but if I had any suggestions for the advertisers it would be to start making ads LESS intrusive.
Stupid, sexy Flanders.
I stopped using AdBlock when I realised I don't mind ads in principle, I only mind:
* dodgy javascript (noscript)
* flash (flashblock)
* animated gifs (some setting in about:config)
with these 3, I almost never see ads anyway, and the ones I do are inobtrusive and I don't mind them.
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It'll just force advertisers back to an older style of ads. Back in the B&W days of TV, it wasn't unusual to have program sponsorships with product placement embedded in the media. There weren't any commercials as we know them today, the talent would switch to talking about the product, then go back to the script.
I could see the same thing in new age media. Text based ads inside the article, not being injected from someplace like pointroll or doubleclick. It's not the ads people mind as much as the blaring, billboard-style, obnoxious Flash ads. Or the latest excuse us while we take over your screen for 15 seconds.
This article was sponsored by Pepsi would be a lot more effective than blasting banner ads that half of users never see or "take over" ads that irritate the daylights out of the viewer.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The money has to come from somewhere. Having an ad on your screen does noone any good if you just ignore it.
Sadly, the quality control on many banner ads is lacking. Scams, attempts to exploit bugs, et cetera. This is the same industry that produces spam and most of the malware these days.
Maybe we should be trying to find better alertnatives for funding instead of relying on an industry which is usually best served by misinforming, tricking and ripping people off or at the very least intrusively forcing information on people.
Networks are self-similar. People who *rely* on ads are not going to block them. I never click on ads so AdBlock Plus makes sense for me.
Targeted ads are the norm on the Internet and hence targeted ads can also be described as "search results", ergo Google is number one in online advertising by marrying ads with results as the most effective means.
Given then that networks are self-similar, I just see AdBlock Plus as something those who would never click on ads anyway would logically use and are saving people who pay for impressions money by not showing ads to people like myself who scorn them all. Advertising works because people appreciate them, not through some subliminal chicanery. I suspect that targeting of ads will be so specific and appreciated in the future that the ad targeting will surpass relevance over Google's generalized search results. After all, ads are paid for per word and other other demographic data, Google's search results not so much.
Self-similar.
I like Slashdot, so why should I not offer my eyeballs to help pay for it? And maybe I need something being advertised here.
How about offering me a checkbox: "Do you want to not see this offer to remove ads? The checkbox is also available in your profile settings."
While we're at ads and how webpages do it, something that I noticed a while ago and was honestly taken aback by its pure awesomeness.
Slashdot came up with the idea (or maybe they didn't, I don't care, I think the idea is great) that you are allowed to block ads even as a "normal" non-subscribing user if your comments are topical and well liked. Seeing this felt awesome! I felt like /. really thought that my participation was an 'asset', enough to warrant giving me genuinely free content (not even paid by someone else but actually "presenting" me with a member function).
Sure, it's not like they pay me to write stuff here, they don't really lose a lot of money that way, mostly because I don't even turn ads off, they're not really in any way bothersome. But it felt really nice to be 'thanked' that way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know there are a lot of people here to hate any kind of advertising with a passion, and fervently wish we could all pastoralize like in the ending of BSG. But when you deliver an audience, people will pay to get their word out. The real tragedy is scattershot ads that increase noise, without delivering anything of value, thus driving out the good ads, too. When an ad delivers something of value (information you wouldn't have had otherwise), that's a bit different. Yeah you say you'd google it if you wanted to know, but actually, you wouldn't.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Which I could do by checking one option box on my account. I don't do it because Slashdot's ads aren't (usually) intrusive or annoying. if Slashdot had rollover-activated ads, or ads with sound, I'd block them in a heartbeat.
TopWebComics has a similar option box. I do block them there, because many of their ads are video clips that take time and bandwidth to load, and are noisy to boot.
If web sites keep their ads relevant, non-intrusive, and down to a reasonable fraction of the total content, I won't block them, and I suspect the vast majority of consumers would do the same.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Ironically, I find the local newspaper websites to be the worst. For example, lansingstatejournal.com. When viewing it unblocked (Chrome for instance) it is awful - huge graphics and flash ads dwarfing the content. I actually blame Gannett and whatever yahoos they went with to produce their content. On the other hand, I find mlive.com to present their news nicely.
I know Adblocker Plus...
Even though Slashdot offer me an option to disable the Ad, I didn't check it...Hell, I do really find some Ad useful sometimes and I don't want to miss that. Ad has it place.
If we promote the use of AdBlocker, Advertiser will find their way to squeeze in,...No please, I don't want intrusive ad to interfere with my web surfing experience.
I don't understand why so many people think that all ads are bad, they aren't. Yes there is annoying ones which we could do without, primarily anything involving a popup, popunder, and a lot of flash or animated gifs that cause seizures. But some ads actually do serve a legitimate cause/purpose and provide value to the user and site. For example, I more than likely would not have discovered RPGCountdown had it not been for one of their ads being displayed on a popular site I visit. Essentially, I was visiting a RPG Social site and saw an ad for an RPG related itunes show and now I listen to it when I can.
This is basically a perfect example of how ads should work. Unfortunately many unrelated or harmful ads sneak into places that they don't belong. We need to find a way to make the policing of ads better and not just remove all ads.
Ave Molech Setting
The summary blathers on about how newspapers should stick it to online media.
Well, bad news. Most of those newspapers have most of their content online. So....????
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
One thing people miss is that paid content often contains ads, and advertisers are likely to pay more for those ads.
The logic is, if you're paying for content, then you must be really engaged with it. Say I charge 10c to visit my page about SCUBA diving. I can tell advertisers - look, I don't get as many visits as those free SCUBA sites, but I can demonstrate that every visitor is (a) really into SCUBA and (b) prepared to spend money.
That's the kind of eyeballs an advertiser wants to reach. In theory, they'll pay more to advertise on such a site than they would on a competing free page.
This is actually the reason print magazines and newspapers charge a cover price. The marginal cost of printing and distributing them is negligible. But showing advertisers that the readership is commited, that's priceless.
http://salescircular.com/
Different people, different models.
When I use advertising I want to see nothing but ads. That is what Sales Circular http://salescircular.com/ does. It is nothing but ads and competitor's prices are shown side-by-side.
Personally I think everyone buys things on sale, wants to buy things on sale. However, for someone like myself I consume ads using a different model.
My desired advertising consumption is analogous to the classified ads section of newspapers, or Craig's List.
Online marketing needs to cover their customer consumption bases when it comes to consumer advertising. People like myself who perhaps use AdBlock Plus still want things on sale, we just would prefer to browse ads all-at-once when we are looking for sales, as opposed to seeing ads intermixed with content.
At the end of the day, though, I'm still looking for things on sale and I still buy advertised product.
I don't see AdBlock Plus as a threat, just an expression how different types of consumers like myself use different tactics to find what is on sale. This is no different in the past where Catalogs, Classifieds, Yellow Pages, Magazines, etc all had different audiences they were reaching.
Whose side are you on?
Our economy is collapsing around us in a series of bubbles. Advertising, although hit hard, may have further down to go, as companies looking to save money realize what works and what doesn't. Just think of your own usage of the web. What sort of advertising do you respond to, what do you find annoying and useless? There comes a point when the ad industry can no longer hold up under its own self perpetuating hype and is cut back. As revenue from this dries up as a result, how do you replace it?
I do like the idea of news sources independent to potential influence by advertisers, I don't really like the idea of different universes of news being behind different walls. With the huge amount of choice people have lately, most of us cope by sticking to sources we feel align well with and reinforce our own views. Fox News exploits this fact brilliantly on cable. The fact that I won't watch it is just as important as the fact that so many people do. But even though I am not someone interested in paying for News Corporation anything, I can still go over there and take a look at what they are saying when I feel like, and get a different point of view to consider. With these pay walls, I think there needs to be care to not also create walls around discourse and ideas, where self selected fragmentation gets even worse.
Although it does beg the question, if you have to pay with money, instead of time, to be in each "club", how much would people invest to belong? How many would drop out entirely?
If we are going to have to pay for content, I would like to see something like the cable television model, but without the local monopolies. You can pay content providers directly, al la cart, but those same providers can make bulk deals with content aggregators, and I can then pay the aggregator for discounted access to a wide range of content. This is kind of AOL used to be before it imploded, because they didn't get that when people pay, they expect a certain amount of respect and objectivity in return.
In the end, I would like everything to be freely available to everyone. But making news takes money, and if the ad bubble bursts, where will that money come from? I would hope there could be a strong not-for-profit component in whatever happens, like we have in TV with PBS, that can be free for all.
So the whole ad blocker issue may be moot, for precisely the reason why people use them in the first place.
I work for a parent company that owns four major US newspapers, we would NOT want this. We make hundreds of thousands of dollars a day off ads on the papers web sites and everyone knows paper as a medium is on it's way out, not overnight but the stats don't lie in this case. Doesn't everyone like free content anyway? I mean seriously, rather Mc'E'Dees pay for the bandwidth and time to make it work than me. I would, and those are the only options, period regardless of what Obama tells you! This undermines the entire successful business model of commerce on the net. I also do not buy that it would be standard and on by default in five years. This author needs to move to Washington DC, think he'd fit in.
"if newspapers wanted to hit the online content industry hard right now, they would be running non-stop information about how to obtain and use Ad Block Plus" This is a bit of a mis-statement. Most of the larger newspapers have a significant interest in making money through online advertising. I happen to work for a large media company with a history in print. There has been a shift in upper management, they realize that they now make more money online than they do in print and that's where the future is headed. Print publications can either learn how to adjust to this and realize they can intelligently monetize their brand online or they can fail and go out of business. As long as they have a strong brand identity with valuable content they can survive if they adapt their revenue streams appropriately.
Our local newspaper - owned by a "mainstream media" conglomeration - has a free ad-supported web site that it is even using to compete with TV news by adding video. So why would they want to kill off ad-supported web sites?
The mainstream media can't choke out all the competition by simply blocking one method of advertising.
Either, as others have suggested, they'll find other ways to present their ads or, as one collapses, three more will spring up behind them. There's no barrier to entry in publishing on the Internet, any fool can do it (and most fools do, from the looks of it).
Perhaps a better strategy for the mainstream media would be to have more compelling content?
-B-
This idea assumes that ad-funded online media is the biggest threat to the mainstream media, and furthermore that by cutting off the revenue source, people will stop doing it.
However most of the media content I get online is posted by interested amateurs who, at worst, use a few static banners and Google ads to cover their hosting costs. I generally get my editorial from blogs, and local and national news pops up on Twitter or Livejournal communities in no time at all. None of these people are using enough banners to motivate me to block them, and I imagine they'd continue to create for the sake of creating even if they didn't make a single penny.
The biggest stupidity is that the people seeking to monetise online media, the people with the biggest, most obnoxious video-saturated banners, the people who absolutely have to get a return on investment from the effort, and therefore the people who would be most hurt by this plan, would be the MSM themselves. The only exception I can think of is the BBC, whose site is ad-free.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Well, that's why I use flashblock (not adblock). Of course, the sites I hang out on are generally more likely to have ads targeted to my general interests (my t-shirt collection would be much smaller, for one), so I don't really want to block all ads, but flash ads are, I agree, too annoying to accept.
Users have shown that they will not pay for online content unless there is an actual value-add. News sites provide nothing that can't be eventually seen on TV or read elsewhere.
It depends on exactly what you mean by "eventually seen on TV". How long of a time frame is "eventually", and by "TV" do you mean the local stations or cable news?
I'm a recent convert to Google Chrome. Now that I see the ads, I don't even know why I've been blocking them. Most of the sites I visit have sufficiently discreet ads which are not annoying at all. In fact, I barely even notice them. (Does Slashdot even have ads? Sorry! I forgot to look.) Adblockers are great for preventing our mothers and grandmothers from clicking on ads we know they shouldn't click. Other than that, I think it's important that we support internet businesses by loading and viewing their ads. It's the least we can do.
Indeed. Your parent poster is obviously ignorant of the fact that many users are for one reason or another constrained to the use of mobile connections with sucky bandwidth limits, or (worse) stuck with crappy dialup connections.
I have a basic mobile service myself, for use when I am away from home, and my limit would easily be breached if I were to allow free rein to all of the unsolicited dreck most sites choose to deliver.
I don't really care about animated gif, but I do not like flash ads, they take up more space, more CPU cycles and load slow if I have a slow connection (my mobile for example).
But I really HATE ads with sound.
why? Because they bemoan the loss of subscribers to their print edition yet many of the articles tell you to go online if you want to see more.
Well hell, which is it? I can view the majority of their online content for free which includes the complete articles I just read in the print edition. I don't see online versions stating "for more in depth coverage buy the print edition".
the problem papers face with the net is that as a people we love to be heard more than we listen, as such everyone can be a news broadcaster, we just have to come up with software which allows us and others to rate the aggregation and news people to filter out the unreliable.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Waging a war on your customers is not the best way to retain them.
Advertising is the mainstream way to get paid for content but may not be the only way.
Creativity thrives in a restricted environment.
The internet as a medium brings unprecedented flexibility to the marketplace.
Attention + time = value, both from content creators' and content consumers' perspective.
Someone, somewhere, holds the answer in their imagination.
Adblock will eventually be worked around on the server side when it becomes profitable to do so. Instead of serving the javascript and linked ad content, servers will just begin to resolve the advertising on the server side and merge it directly into the served content. YouTube and similar sites have already started doing this with ads that pop up directly in their content player.
Ads aren't the problem. There's nothing wrong with using the same business model as radio and TV -- give the product away for free and make money from advertising. The TV networks make billions this way. The problem is that every website has decided to fill every page with 20 bouncing flashing ads that are so annoying and distracting that you can't read the content.
That's why Adblock has become a necessity.
As with most things, I feel annoyed at the extremes of both sides.
On the publisher side, there are some websites who have an obsession to extract as much cash out of the consumer as possible. Even it means that the consumer will have to trawl through 5x as many ads, for only an extra measly 1% income for the publisher. I hate this, because diminishing returns set in very quickly after a certain point. Publishers don't realise that extra 1-5% results in massive frustration for the consumer. For me personally, I hate how long they take to load in, even more than the look of them.
On the consumer side, some people simply don't realise if everyone uses something like Adblock plus, then web sites will either die, enforce more hacky advertising, or simply charge for people to view their content (and probably go bust that way). That would be a shame - web site publishers need to make a living too of course, and some of them really deserve it.
So for us slashdotters, keep on using it (we're less likely to click any ads anyway), but let's not publicize this, (and for goodness sake, make sure FF doesn't include ad blocking by default). We all win this way, and hopefully a fairly comfortable middleground is reached.
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I already use Adblock Plus and love it. I recommend it to anyone. I can live without publicity so I don't give a fuck if it goes the way of the dodo.
Advertisements annoy the hell out of me. I don't have money to buy all of their products, so stop diverting my attention.
Even worse, my kids are bombarded with advertisements the whole fucking day. I don't want to educate them to be braindead consumerist pricks, but I have no choice.
If somehow I suddenly had to pay for all news on the internet, I probably would stop reading news.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Yes when Democrats and Republicans start agreeing on thing, dogs stop chasing cats, and people agree that 'vi' is the best editor.
The ONLY thing that makes the status quo of a business change is the revenue forecast. Advertising developers are not going to suddenly become caring & socially conscious citizens. I have no idea who the first sleazeball was who determined that being annoying and misleading resulted in more sales - but from that point in history, capitalism has had an evil underbelly. The problem is, there's no better economic system...
A site owner has every right to put whatever they want on their site. The reader has no obligation to render it in any particular way.
I love adblock, of course; browsing would be unbearable without it. But it's no panacea. Advertisers have lots of ways around it. Some sites still manage to get popups past it; that's with adblock, flashblock, and a few other blockers installed. Distributing adblock around further will cause some advertisers to go away, and the remainder to get worse and more pervasive.
I'm no security buff, but could you use https as a way around some ad-blockers? I mean, if you jacketed up all your communications in a security blanket than no third party would be able to pick it apart and strip your ads, would they? And, if the browser allowed third party components to screw with your https stuff after it has been decrypted, isn't that like one hell of a security hole?
This is my sig.
Slashdot itself has a "disable advertising" button I can press to turn off ads...how hard are you guys trying to go out of business by pandering to these types?
I like the /. approach. That "disable advertising" button only appears if you've earned a high karma. If you're comments are of a high quality, you're paying for Slashdot by contributing good comments. If your karma is lower, you're paying by eyeballing ads.
There is print news and TV news in much the same way that there is Camembert and there is that stuff that comes out of the spray can. You'll never see the same thing on TV; namely, you'll never see in-depth factual reporting. I don't believe print journalism is some paragon of perfection, but TV news is a total farce. I'm continually amazed that people take things like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC seriously.
Besides overall quality, the other thing that print news brings to the table is serious investigative journalism. I can recall many major investigative stories broken by the New York Times and even papers such as USA Today. I struggle to remember any instances of major stories (of a non-tabloid nature) unearthed by TV investigative journalism. This sort of journalism is really important to the nation, but the problem is that it entails a big positive externality. The newspaper pays the price for the journalism, but even if we don't read the paper (or website) we benefit from the oversight of our public institutions, and TV news gets to repeat the headline and use it as the basis for talking head opinion infotainment. Since the rest of us don't have to pay for the benefit derived, that poses a serious problem for the newspaper.
Unfortunately, I can't see any good solution to this issue. I don't see how you can get people to start paying for that external benefit without measures that would be too dangerous to the freedom of speech or would give government too much control over the media. But without the sunlight that investigative journalism shines on our public institutions (corporate and government), I expect things to get considerably worse in society.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Man, talk about product placement. Makes me thing the whole article is just one big ad for AdBlock Plus!
I'd drop ABP in a heartbeat if advertisers simply stopped using animation. I don't object to adwords or quiet banners - someone has to pay the bills after all. But those noisy, CPU-soaking, neurotic pleas for attention drive me to do something about it.
If they want my eyeballs back, they'll have to become more civilized about it.
But I'm really hopeful about the future of the news. Most of the business will disappear in the near future. When the current publishers are mostly gone, these bloggers, aggregators and others will simply lose their free ride. Only a very small number of organizations will be able to support a news gathering operation. No more little papers, maybe no more little local TV news shows. Some of the big wire services might be superfluous. But some will survive, and anyone who wants to know what's happening will have to pay them. Right Rupert?
I have a pretty high-latency connection, and I find even non-flash ads really slow down my browsing, since frequently rendering the entire page is held up by the browser trying to DNS-resolve and get some minor bit of data from ads.somewhere.com. Pages loading an HTML file and a few images from one server load a lot faster on high-latency connections than pages that have to hit up 5 servers on 5 different domains to assemble their content. (Yes, HTTP pipelining helps a bit, but the risk of something being held up is still much higher.)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
And ad servers are SLOW. When I'm surfing on a machine that doesn't have adblocking and a page is loading slow, I look at the status indicator and invariably it's waiting for ads or google analytics. Which is why I block both on any machine I have access to.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
There is no such thing as ad block! There's no way to block ads, even if you used browsers other than the one that came with your Windows. Those other browsers (Chrome and Firefox) are just IE rebranded anyway, don't use them. IE is safer and better. Just click on the ads and buy stuff they advertise and they will go away, I guarantee it. Stop talking about ad blocks, that's something that doesn't exist, there will never be such thing as ad block. You all know it's as absurd, nobody can stop ads. Jesus loves ads. This whole article is one big April fool's joke, don't pay attention to any of it. In fact, stop reading right now and go back to watching porn or dancing rabbits. Okay, the long paragraph above most likely bored the morons so they wont even realize there's other stuff written here. So for those who are not morons with short attention spans: ads are a way to make suckers pay for shit you otherwise would need to pay for yourself, it's a selective tax on stupidity. Ads are the reason I can get my news for free and get other people provide a service without me having to pay a dime. Let's keep it that way, please. Use an ad blocker and stfu about it, yes?
...move.
I don't mind ads on a page, I just wish they behaved more like prints ads and stayed still. As soon as anything on a webpage moves, unless I want it to be there (i.e. the moving item is the purpose of the page and what I am looking at), I get ride of it.
The way I view items on a page that moves, is the equivalent of someone beside me jumping up and down yelling 'Look at me!!!'. I don't know many people who would stand for this. Webpages that behave like this I either modify with FF add-ons, or don't visit.
You'll still see the ads if http://www.newsmagazineyouliketoread.com/ serves up 3rd-party ads "through" its own web server, like http://www.newsmagazineyouliketoread.com/ads/thirdparty/....
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is brilliant and I'm actually kind of disappointed in myself for not thinking of it sooner. I hope they do it. Current AdBlock users (like myself) are getting a lot of things for free that other people are paying for. That isn't fair. I don't want ads, but I am willing to support other business models, if they come about.
I don't get it -- doesn't the mainstream media get revenue from adblockers as well? Last time I checked, just about every newspaper site used it. Hell, CNN has google text ads running on the lower right. If they tried a stunt like this, they'd be cannibalizing themselves.
If there's a space for a competitor to revive for-pay content, it's as a super aggregator. Someone should reinvent the cronkite-era 15 minutes of uninterrupted daily news, make it better than anyone else's coverage, and sell it for a few cents a day.
"given the generally accepted principle in our economy that anything other than constant growth in profits is failure"
This is not unique to our economy or economies in general. It is a fact of life. Anything which does not outperform its alternatives within a domain will be obsoleted by them. This is not bad any more than gravity or the speed of light is bad. It's the way the universe works.
Stasis is death. Growth is life. Steady increases in growth rates are more lively than static growth rates. Exponential growth is a universal constant in dynamic systems.
You would have us all thoroughly convinced of your superiority if only you hadn't forgotten to say "sheeple".
Personally, I use Adblock Plus and NoScript at home, because all that blinky-wiggly-flashy crap is too distracting and ruins my enjoyment of reading articles online. However, even if no one used Adblock Plus or NoScript or Flashblock, advertisers are still screwed. Why?
Because people have learned to ignore ads. See the following articles by Usability guru Jakob Nielsen:
Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored, and
Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings
That's why ads are more and more intrusive: because advertisers have, like an incompetent pet owner, trained users NOT to look at graphical banners and sidebar ads. (I wish they'd figure out they've trained people to auto-close pop-ups, pop-unders and sliding windows, too). They've trained users to the point where users will overlook content that resembles an ad.
Advertisers: You're doing it wrong.
---dragoness
QUESTION: Perhaps someone can answer this for me, as I have always wondered about it - do AdBlock &/or NoScript actually STOP the packets streaming in for adbanners & such, or, do they merely "mask" their output?
It depends on the ad. NoScript blocks JavaScript from running, which blocks pages and images and flash loaded by JavaScript from loading. It also blocks Java, Flash, and other "active content" from running, but I'm not 100% sure if it prevents it from loading if it's loaded by non-blocked code such as plain old HTML. I would assume it does prevent downloading since 1) firefox allows such blocking 2) it would be inefficient to download what you don't need to download, and 3) the people behind NoScript aren't idiots.
One disadvantage host-based blocks have: It's generally a good practice to make your hosts file editable only by the administrative account. This makes it inconvenient to modify it "on demand." This is both a feature and an annoyance. I've used host-file management to block out unwanted web sites myself, but I find tools like NoScript are much more effective unless your goal is to literally black-list a certain hostname 100%. I've also used routing-table-based blacklisting to blacklist IP addresses or ranges of IP addresses, but it was to effect a "you're totally invisible" policy, not to block ads.
By the way, your overuse of bold, ALL CAPS, and your very long messages get in the way of what you are trying to say. My eyes glazed over as I was reading your first missive. Please be briefer and emphasize only a very small percentage of your words, or none at all.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is exactly one of the reasons why we run Trend Micro's content filtering on our Cisco ASA firewall. Works like a charm.
-ted
Is not enougth the crappy flash or gif-animated ad. Who will click on ad that annouces a thing like "winantivirus" (know rogueware) or crap like "win one million!!! click here now!!!" (scam site or worst)?
Nobody likes lying propaganda, simple that. This is why 90% (or more) of ads are blocked or ignored.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I started using ad blocking software back on dial up to speed up the connection, and then when I went to broadband I stopped for a while. When ad servers started sending out "ads" that were malware I started blocking them again. There is simply no reason to let any ads through that can overcome this single reason. Both on my computers and ANY I set up for someone else, a suite of Firefox/AdblockPlus/Anti-Virus/Anti-spyware goes on, and FF is the default browser. The ads especially with flash slow down my computer. My FF combo is FASTER on my Atom based netbook, then the same page on my big system, I7 3GHZ with IE.
Security is about layers of protection, and ad blocking is one of those layers.
I find it annoying how slowly pages load when flash is playing.
Opening a Youtube link takes a half second, and leaving the page takes about eight. That's because the video stream packets seem to be prioritized over regular http requests. :/
is useless a well designed ad, if the announced product is a know trap or junk.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Why, if the mainstream never bothered to embrace ad-blocking technology, would one think it's possible for them to embrace Internet adblockers?
These days, TV ads are just as annoying and obnoxious as Internet ads, but guess what? Like Internet advertising these days, TV ads are obnoxious and interfere with the media you are trying to watch.
Especially the cable TV networks such as TNT, FX, and TBS. When they show movies, there is always a 15 minutes ad break every 15 minutes. They always show movies that have the best scenes of movies cut out to show more commercials. The actual film or TV show's sound is often lowered, and the commercials themselves always use high audio compression to make the ads much louder than the TV, resulting in an awkward transition from a low-volume dramatic scene of a TV show to a loud and obnoxious ad for Viagra. Oh, and let's not forget those drug companies who advertise their shitty erectile dysfunction drugs (Viagra, Cialis) during sports games when they KNOW kids would be watching, and use sexually suggestive and coercive language and visuals to illustrate what they CLAIM these drugs will do.
Although technology such as DVR has become more prevalent over the years, that's only because major cable companies started OFFERING DVR service... Therefore, the only way the mainstream would bother to embrace Interent Adblockers is if ISPs or browser developers actually made them built into the software.
What surprises me is there is no iTunes like service for magazine and newspaper subscriptions. It would be nice to be able to click on some magazines and local/international newspapers or even a column writer and be able to view the content on my mobile/PC/portable reader . Also a nice RSS feed reader in conjunction with the service that sends me notifications when new articles are published or a magazine I have subscribed to has been released. Right now it's a mess of hundreds of websites thousands of magazines all over the place, each with their own subscription system that has it own quirks. Until the publishing industry at large creates a simple single point subscription system they are wasting their time and mine by blocking or allowing users to access their services. So for now I will just have to use Amarok and 20 odd subscribed news podcasts (automatically downloading daily) to get my daily updates as the print media havent got their act together yet. PS I havent purchased a paper in 4 years as I find paying for something when 80% of the content is irrelevant to me is stupid and a wast of resources ie paper.
By taking most of its revenue by blocking ads. They can even block all the advertising (including their own) and I believe that they would not be infringing any law in any country (even the USA). I'm really amazed that they haven't tried this angle yet.
I'm very sorry but no one gives a fuck because most people to get so incredibly anal-retentive when it comes to things like this.
Ahhh, are you not making any money off of your shitty 'blog? It must be those dirty advert-pirates, stealing your articles.
I bet you still call Javascript internet cancer. Cool, meanwhile no one else gives a fuck. Have a nice day!!!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722
Hmmm, fifty one million, four hundred and eighty six thousand, six hundred and two downloads of NoScript says that possibly some people do think javascript is over rated in some way!
Car analogies break down.
1) NoScript will not block something that's loaded via plain old HTML, unless that something is Flash or an embedded video, or something else that NoScript blocks. ;)
2) You're talking to APK. He exists to write wall-of-text comments. His depth of knowledge is *really* shallow, so don't expect a good conversation out of him.
QUESTION: How can you say that NoScript is "more effective", when NoScript &/or AdBlock ONLY COVERS MOZILLA/FIREFOX PRODUCTS, vs. HOSTS files covering EVERY webbound program you have or use
Ok, I was probably being unfair when I said "more effective" - that's a subjective call that will vary by the individual and what his personal preferences are: If he prefers IE, then NoScript is totally ineffective, if he runs as a non-admin and doesn't want to run Notepad as administrator to edit the hosts file, he will find relying on it a non-starter.
How did you do so? Via the "route" command, or, do you mean @ the router level?
I've done both.
By the way, the reason I criticized your use of bold and length was not merely because it gets in the way of me reading your work, but because it very likely gets in the way of a lot of other people reading your work. This is Slashdot, a place that typically doesn't use a lot of bold and all caps. Using them in excess is like having too much spice in your food: A little goes a long way, and too much spoils the dinner.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The problem with ads is that they're distracting, slow down the browser, and that they potentially jeopardize security. This is why most people don't block Google's ads, they don't cause any of these problems. So, they kind of dug their own grave here.
How is adblock any worse than blocking at the IP level in the hosts file? Unless content providers host the ads and pay for the bandwidth themselves? Personally, most ads, don't bother me, except those that are animated. Those go straight to the bin.
"There is nothing to do it. But to do it." -Floyd Pepper
Not to mention the fact that the flash binary for Linux is quite annoyingly buggy and resource-hogging (as if the great pig Firefox wasn't hogging enough already).
You underestimate the ability of the maintainers of the block lists. Your little trick will have a lifespan measured in hours, if not minutes.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Then man up and post the URL. Otherwise, your personal blog that no one reads anyway doesn't count.
Of course, we should do what's right, regardless of what others do.
But the fact is, I don't click on ads anyway. At all. Even before I used any ad blockers, I just overlooked them, ignored them, and surfed around them. A site isn't going to make more money by my not blocking ads. I'm not using any more of their bandwidth than the search engines that hit their site multiple times a day. I might even be using less bandwidth than most people, if I avoid loading some ads.
Besides, think about TV. Is there an unwritten contract between me and networks and advertisers that says I have agreed to sit there and watch commercials? That I won't get up and go to the bathroom, or change channels, or use the mute button? I'm sure they'd like me to.
The very nature of advertising and commercials is that the advertisers are casting a wide net, throwing bottles into the ocean, not knowing who they will catch, if anyone. If they choose to spend their money trying to reach people like me, that's their decision. I haven't agreed to allow them to fill my brain with their messages. If Web site owners choose to rely on advertising to survive, that's their decision. I haven't agreed to click on ads or look at ads.
If you choose to subject yourself to them, that's fine. But I completely disagree that it's a moral decision. It's not "right" to not block ads, and it's not "wrong" to block them, just as it isn't wrong to change the channel, use the mute button, or flip a page in a magazine without looking at an ad.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
If you don't waste your time with deranged AC's, disregard the rest of this comment.
Otherwise, check out what APK has been doing today:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1327945&cid=28980845
On the one hand, he makes my points for me. On the other hand, you can't have a conversation with him, so he's boring. *shrug*