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.'"
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
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?
Ads mostly exist to put their brand name in front of your eyeballs.
Later on, when you're out buying some stuff, you need some $foo. You see two packages, brand X and brand Y. You have seen X before, but Y is entirely unfamiliar to you. So you buy X. What you don't remember at the moment is that only reason why X is familiar is because you've seen it in ads.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
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
"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."
>> and are almost universally designed to mislead
Well the laugh is on you buddy, because I just bought a six-pack of Bud Light, and any minute now a bikini-clad model is going to show up at my house to have baby oil rubbed all over her chest.
ads don't make you buy stuff...your lack of self-control, willpower, and independent thought makes you buy stuff
It's not that simple. It has been scientifically proven that when seeing certain ads multiple times, even not consciously, can result in people having a positive opinion on a product. They forget the source of their opinion is actually an advertisement.
At first, I used ad blockers because of their distraction. Now, I use them mainly because I don't want marketeers pilfering in my mind.
Source: Hawks in sheep's clothing.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
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.