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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.
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.
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?
Are they are forgetting that there are still people out there stuck on dialup?
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.
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
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.
If a site is too obnoxious, i will just avoid it completely.
yet here you are, reading slashdot replies...