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Fighting Ad Blockers With Captcha Ads
krou writes "Living in an ad-free internet thanks to ad blockers? That could be a thing of the past if software firm NuCaptcha has their way by making captchas into ads. 'Instead of the traditional squiggly word that users have to decipher, the new system shows them a video advert with a short message scrolling across it. The user has to identify and retype part of the message to proceed. Companies including Electronic Arts, Wrigley and Disney have already signed up.'"
Easy. If I really want to use such a site, I'll just enable that add, authorize myself and disable it again. Besides, if it's video it'll most likely be caught in my flash-blocker rather than the ad-blocker.
Yes, this is going to endear me to EA and Disney - basically not only making me wait through an ad, but FORCING me to pay attention to it.
Hooray for video captcha ads in expensive bandwidth countries!
You know its love when you memorize her IP address to skip DNS overhead.
If I see one of these, I think I'll just go somewhere else. It'd have to be something really compelling to make me endure that kind of abuse.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
...your lack of self-control, willpower, and independent thought makes you buy stuff after seeing an ad.
And because adverts essentially prey on weakness and are almost universally designed to mislead, it is quite simple to set your policy to being discouraged by any ad you see from purchasing from the sponsor.
So, it's advert blocking all the way, and anything which manages to slip through is avoided with extreme prejudice.
Also, don't forget that the real word in recaptcha is always "faeces". Stop doing free work for the biggest polluter of the Internet with adverts.
If a site is too obnoxious, i will just avoid it completely.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
If we are reading scrolling text, would we then be paying attention to the ad's content? This seems less like a way for users to see advertising content and more an exercise in dickery. I am finding more and more content behind 30 second video ads. My current behavior is just go read something in another tab and come back to it after the ad is done. My prediction? Captcha ads will tank site readership. Seriously there is nothing I can think of on a chewing gum site that would require me to answer a pop quiz to view.
There are two kinds of fool. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.
My response will be simple.
Here's another website I can live without. There are very, very few site I frequent that I honestly need (my webmail, and... and... I'll think of something).
Seriously, I would expect these to be traffic killers.
The quickest way to get me off your site/article is by making me watch an ad before the video starts. I don't like watching videos when I could just read an article in general, but something occasionally seems interesting enough that I click play. As soon as I see the 'your video will begin in 15 seconds' or hear some ad start, I close the tab and move on. I understand that ads are needed for some sites to generate revenue, but you've got my attention for _seconds_ so when I have to spend any length of that time watching a commercial I just move on.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
This will backfire. Too many moving parts to do it's functional job effectively. If a video captcha was a good solution it would already be in use. Making the video an advert won't help. It probably won't hurt but that's beside the point. People will try a few times then give up and start complaining. Captchas are annoying enough already.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
But since I will associate $PRODUCT_X with an abusive pointless waste of my time, instead of merely ignoring $PRODUCT_X, I shall be sure to actively avoid paying for it, ever, and I shall recommend said boycott to all my friends and acquaintances. Congratulations, your marketing campaign for $PRODUCT_X has now gone viral.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Guess what. They don't care. The sort of folks who obsessively block ads aren't good customers anyway, and they aren't interested in random traffic, they are only interested in traffic from potential consumers.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
an advertisement is essentially a form of seduction. that's why sex figures so large in advertising. you are trying to entice someone into buying your product, to woo them to come hither
so when you intrusively force someone to view your ad, you've just completely destroyed the psychology of what makes any advertisement work
you have in fact performed a pavlovian experiment: you've force someone into an unpleasant experience, then associated that unpleasant experience with your brand name. much as with pavlov's dogs who started salivating whenever they heard a bell because you always played a bell before feeding them, forced viewing associates the unpleasurable feeling of coercion with your brand name and products
so all these idiots have done is perfected the art of anti-advertising, of driving people away from your product
just make the ad nonintrusive, and anyone who is predisposed to your product might click. that's the best you can do. anything more intrusive simply destroys your brand name with the pavlovian association as described above
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Its about time that a lot of people on slashdot realised that money doesn't grow on trees and what they enjoy on the net eventually has to be paid for by someone. If putting up with a short advert means I can continue to enjoy a lot of free sites then thats fine by me and I suspect a lot of other people.
I'll add them to my list of "websites I will never visit, places I will never buy anything from", it's a steadily growing list.
When mega rich multinational megacorps stop STEALING ALL MY BANDWIDTH then maybe I'll think about buying their product.
MAYBE.
Actively going out of your way to piss off your customers is NOT a good business model - one day you will learn.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
How exactly are vision-impaired visitors supposed to read this scrolling message?
If the owners of a website are willing to get paid for using a CAPTCHA system, then I guess they're also willing to lose most of their users because of it.
There are other methods to keep your website clean.
At that point, why not just go ahead and use a paywall?
Anything so interesting that I'm willing to spend my attention span deactivating the advertisement filter (hint: not much, with so many free alternatives for content) and paying attention would probably be worth paying to see. And any payment I'm willing to make, no matter how small, is likely to exceed the pittance a single ad impression (even a verified one) is worth.
Are they are forgetting that there are still people out there stuck on dialup?
I block video ads because the ones that make sound are far too intrusive (and hard to track down if you have lots of tabs open) and pop-up ads...
I don't really mind small graphical or text based ads, and still have ads on slashdot despite being given the option to turn them off.
The more intrusive ads become, the more likely i am to block them and avoid the sites which show them.
I especially hate the video ads that are on failblog these days, they force you to sit through the same advertisement for every video you watch, and the ads are full videos 30 seconds to a minute in length wasting your bandwidth and quite often are for a product not even being sold here.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Seriously, who is not getting this message? Why do ad-blockers exist at all?
How about finding a new revenue stream that doesn't annoy me to the point where I get off my ass and do something about it!
crazy dynamite monkey
The "Average User" dose not even know how to not click ok every time it pops up.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
"You need the latest version of Flash to view this captcha, to sign up for our website, to register your product, to download the update, to fix the problem that we shipped it with. Please download and run this executable now."
My general rule is that if I have to take my hand off the mouse to view your content, I'm going elsewhere. I'll even put up with short interstitials, but I don't do quizzes.
Log in or piss off.
I don't think that the intent is to make you watch a video ad. I think what they want to do is make you get past a video captcha to prove you're not a bot. Then, the website owner can be assured that his content is being viewed only by humans and not stolen by bots.
Something like this would be useful for TicketMaster and Orbitz. They could better protect their valuable content.
because it will shortly result in major advances in image recognition/parsing technology. I foresee a Firefox addon that will hide the 'ad-CAPTCHA', substituting a button for the user to click on. The CAPTCHA recognition process will happen transparently. Of course this will break CAPTCHA altogether, but we can lay that one at the feet of the advertising industry.
Never underestimate the power of a pissed-off programmer when faced with the 'all your eyeballs are belong to us' attitude of some arrogant advertising wonk.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
whenever i encounter these javascript underlining thing adds, i will stop at NOTHING untill all relevant hosts have been included in my hosts file, pointing to good ol 127.0.0.1
it usually takes a few minutes/tries to find all relevant add-servers in the resources list for a web-page, but i find it is worth the effort
People, what a bunch of bastards
Its your time, your system, you're paying for everything in the first place.
Yet they have the RIGHT to stuff their "Advertising Messages" down your throat and you're not allowed to do anything to avoid having to take notice?
It makes me sick, cat sick.
And the programmer scum who prostitute their art to provide this shit will be next in line against the wall after the lawyers and bankers.
Expression of disgust censored by Slashdot wit the message "Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters"
I don't block ads because I hate ads, I block them because I hate These.
I don't trust Ad firms. Especially when most of them will take anybody's money that waves in front of their face and distribute their infected Flash/JavaScript file without question, and the rest get tricked into running them. Considering that a rogueware firm can buy tons of ads with just one fake antivirus buy, I trust them even less.
The day ad firms decided to allow flash and scripts in ads was the day they asked to be blocked.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
If I have an ad-paid site, I wouldn't mind ad-blockers visiting. The theory is that if they enjoy the site, it's likely they'll spread the news to people who don't block ads. They tell people, link to it on their blogs and Facebook, etc. Thus even the people who don't make me more money directly would be making me more money indirectly. Bandwidth is cheap compared to the cost of word-of-mouth advertising.
It's kind of the same principle of how as file-sharing goes up, so does music industry revenues. Yes, file-sharer "lose" money for the industry when they don't pay for music. They also drive the industry by providing "buzz" and testimonial to what they listen to to their friends.
The original poster is wrong. They do care, and you are wrong, because they care for the wrong reason.
The problem is that advertisers sell ads, not the product they are advertising. Ads themselves are the product advertising companies like the one in this article are selling. Those who buy ads are often as bamboozled as ordinary consumers with statistics made up on the spot being sold as facts.
At the core is a fundemental believe that ads work. This is not suprising since ads themselves often work on certain base believes. That a smell will attract scores of women. That cars are driven on open roads with not another car insight.
In this fantasy world, the idea that people REALLY DO NOT FUCKING WANT TO SEE YOUR GODDAMNED AD doesn't exist. And partly they are right. All those annoying flash ads? They work. They sell the product behind them. So naturally if you can make your ad even more annoying, even more intrusive, surely that would mean even bigger results?
And here the flaw comes in: Human beings operate on the "straw that broke the camels back" principle. They got a high tolerance but when it is broken it is completly gone. If you block ads because of the most annoying flash ad ever, you will block every ad from there on. Even the nicest completly unobstrusive ad.
But then these companies wonder why you ain't watching their nice ad. And want a solution.
Advertising is totally unregulated industry and they are paying the price for it. Ad blockers once installed don't care about relevancy or niceness of an ad. Block it all because some monkey ad broke the users back.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Since I won't even see the ad in the first place, it will appear to me that the site is broken and I will just move on to a site that isn't broken. These people have already lost me. For the people that do see the ad, I expect that the reaction of many people will be to immediately start seeking a circumvention. So, this escalation is just going to result in higher market share for ad blocking equipped browsers.
When pop-up ads got to be so obnoxious that people were abandoning IE for pop-up blocking browsers, even Microsoft put in a pop-up blocker. This proposal is so obnoxious that if it becomes widespread, you might even see Captcha circumvention built into the next version of Windows.
your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through
Yeah, that’s likely to work out well in the end. Along with...
Ads
Flash ads
Popup ads
Ads
Goatse
Video ads
Flashing GIF ads
Ads
Goatse
Did I forget anything? (Probably. There are really too many to list.)
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Mmm yeah I love being anally raped! FUCK ME HARDER, DISNEY!
Well, that was disturbing. Enjoy the rest of your stay!
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Advertising exists in order to create a demand for stuff people don't need.
People already know they need food, water and shelter. Nobody needs a steak from Outback or a new Disney toy.
They can't "force" anybody to do anything and if viewing specific content requires watching an ad, then I guess they'll have to get along without my business.
since i prefer not to run my browser as root (and keep my /etc unmoddifiable to my own user), i'd rather not have that feature
but yeah, for windows users, this might be a usefull idea
People, what a bunch of bastards
YOU ARE NOT THAT IMPORTANT.
If we're blocking your ads and you shove them down our throats, we simply won't visit. No biggie. The people who block ads have better things to do with their net usage than to fill out silly captchas just to get in.
Captchas as a means of fighting spam are already problematic and hostile to those with disabilities. To use them as a gateway is even more so.
Disney, you are not that important. Wrigley, you are not that important. The rest of you, you are not that important. It's no longer 1975 and everyone captive to 3 major television networks. We will go elsewhere.
Stop trying to shovel shit against the tide. You want us to see your ads? Stop them from being so obnoxious that we get so annoyed that we install the ad blockers. I will not punch your monkey.
Signed:
The smarter people of the Internet with disposable income.
Those of us who don't want to be subjected to your advertisement feces will not be. It doesn't matter if you come to our houses with a loudspeaker and a jumbotron, we're not going to pay attention because we a capable of thinking for ourselves and we have shit to do. You are only increasing the amount of time it takes us to do what we need to, lowering our overall productivity, and slowing down the economy. But go ahead, do whatever you think you need to do to increase your "profits" in the short term, because in the long term, we'll find other places to go that don't try to force shit on us.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire