Adblock Plus To Offer 'Acceptable Ads' Option

Many readers have submitted news of a week-old announcement from Wladimir Palant, creator of Adblock Plus, about a change to the addon that will allow unobtrusive ads to be displayed. The change has been controversial because most people who run the addon strongly dislike seeing any ads. Palant hastens to point out that this is a toggle-able option, and by changing one setting, users can resume ad-less website viewing. Many are upset, however, that the setting defaults to allowing the display of "acceptable" advertisements. The description of "acceptable" ads includes the following criteria: "Static advertisements only (no animations, sounds or similar); Preferably text only, no attention-grabbing images; At most one script that will delay page load (in particular, only a single DNS request)."

Comments

And money changes hands...

[InsightIn140Bytes]

Adblock developers have previously tried to monetarize the addon in very shady ways. I bet this is just another one of those. The announcement quite clearly reads as "we will still block ads, but we will not block Google's ads". I can bet that Google is directly paying them not to block their ads, but still keep continue blocking everyones else. This means increased income to Google, which now suddenly is the only provider whose ads aren't being blocked. This isn't new from Google either - they're currently under monopoly abuse investigation in EU after their contracts with advertisers said that advertisers cannot advertise on competing ad networks, like those from Yahoo and Microsoft.

Shady people, shady deals.

Re:And money changes hands...

[shellbeach]

Shady people, shady deals.

... or it could simply be an acknowledgement that -- like it or not -- the web runs on advertising and allowing a bit of it in might not hurt you if you wanted to be more ethical. Ever thought about how small non-profit websites can afford to keep their domain names? In any case, the Adblock Plus devs have long been clear that one of their aims was to change advertisers' behaviour. This is clearly a move to drive change to a point where advertising is present but less intrusive (and also more ethical, i.e. not using psuedo-OS dialogue boxes to fool the gullible).

Anyway, as long as the option to turn all advertising off is present (and it clearly is) then I can't see how this hurts you or anyone else. But hey, if you don't like it, don't use AdBlock Plus.

Re:And money changes hands...

[mrmeval]

Junk mail is marvelous. It pays for my local post office to exist and have enough people to serve us. It is energy in the form of paper which can be burned. By carefully soliciting the right sources I can get enough paper that can be safely burned to provide around 60 percent of my heating needs. I'd heat water with it but have yet to find an effective and efficient means to do so with wood or paper.
The other benefit is costing advertisers money. Money to pay my friendly postman and money to heat my home. It's a win for me.

Spammers, I'd burn those too if I could catch them thermally depolymerize them and put the biodiesel in my truck.

Re:And money changes hands...

[maxwell demon]

I'd add to the list of obnoxious ads: Anything which tries to track me. And that's unfortunately about 100% of all online ads.
If tracking were necessary, advertising would not have been survived on magazines, TVs, etc., where individual tracking has never been an option.

Security?

[pushing-robot]

I don't have a problem with ads on web pages (hosting isn't free, y'know) but I don't like putting my systems at risk to plugin and browser vulnerabilities. If an ad company promised no flash or potentially dangerous scripts or images I'd add them to my whitelist.

Would be nice if it works as intended/conveyed

[jiriw]

Actually I try to filter my adds through adblock to not block the unobtrusive text based adds (which Google became 'famous' for). If this option is able to do the filter work for me instead of me opting out every single add I find annoying manually, I'd actually very much like the option. If it has this as intention, I'm willing to try it out, see if it can get the job done. I can always put back my original filter list, can I?

Re:Reasons for negative response

[Myopic]

I've tried noscript a couple times, and each time it rendered the web useless. Almost all websites use Javascript to build the page or for the pages to function. Do you really use noscript without problem? Is there something I need to change (a setting, or an expectation) which could make it work for me?

Re:fork time

[Myopic]

I agree with you. I don't hate advertisements in theory; I hate advertisements in practice. In theory, I'm quite happy to be informed of useful and pertinent products and services; but in practice, all I get is screaming, flashing, interrupting, annoying bullshit that blocks my enjoyment of the content I came for. There is an incredibly tiny minority of ads which I block, which I wish would come through (maybe 1 in 10,000 of today's ads), and if we can convince advertisers to conform to certain criteria, then that would make the world Better, and I support that.

But, I think that's pretty unlikely.

Re:TANSTAAFL

[Rob Y.]

Well, some of us hate most ads, but understand that something's got to fund the content. Still, I use Adblock Plus, and would welcome a way to have it allow non-obtrusive stuff through. I don't feel good about freeloading - I do it because I can, and because the ads tend to be overly distracting.

Google seems to have found the sweet spot in web advertising. Their text ads are unobtrusive, and in fact, can be quite useful. They mainly show up when I'm looking to buy something, and are profitable for both Google. What they don't do is try to manipulate my feelings - and that's the main reason I don't mind them. I guess Google's lucky to be in a business that lends itself to such a 'clean' ad-based revenue stream. I don't know if non-search websites can manage this.

Anyway, much as I hate ads, I'd rather control their methods than try to eliminate them. I pay for home delivery of the ad-stuffed New York Times and subscribe to Public TV and radio. Those are habits I made before the web and AdBlock and 'information wants to be free' came along - I'm not sure I'd make them today. And ultimately, that's a shame. I want there to be a New York Times, a PBS and an NPR - and a slashdot...

Special Ad-Friendly Code vs. Subscription Lists

[billstewart]

There's already an obvious way to permit no-annoying ads while blocking annoying ones, which is to have the subscription blacklist you already use for AdBlock delete the entries for the annoying ads. No need to build a special whitelist capability, unless you want to prevent people from using alternative blacklists.

I'm not actually too bothered by having a few ads, as long as

• * None of them use Flash/Javascript/ActiveX/Popups/Popunders/Floatovers/StupidHTML5Tricks/iFrames/etc.
• * None of them use animation, just static images/text
• * None of them use cookies
• * None of them pretend not to be ads
• * None of them are sleazy, annoying, or NSFW.
• * None of them get REFERER except the originating site.

Unfortunately, that kills off most of the advertising services that might be used to support web sites I like (especially the no-tracking features, because the ad services use those to prevent web sites from faking view data.)

The current advertising-like annoyance I still get is Disqus's takeover of the site-comments business. It thinks that I'm blocking its cookies (I'm not), so some combination of Linux, Firefox, NoScript, Ghostery, AdBlockPlus, FF's Don't track is breaking it. (Also, it has lots of other problems, like not being good at keeping track of multiple identities - my comment histories on BoingBoing and various newspapers aren't supposed to all get lost, which happens if they get mushed together into one Disqus ID.)

Reasonable regardless of motive

[markdavis]

Regardless of the motives on the part of Adblock Plus or conspiracy theories in other postings- the whole reason I started blocking ads was EXACTLY because of ads that:

1) Contain animation (of ANY type)
2) Contain sound
3) Use Mouseovers or now page floating/etc
4) Are unreasonable numerous or large
5) Delay page loading

If I could use Adblock to stop only the above and allow reasonably sized and fast loading, relevant, text based, or static image based ads, I would do so. I have said that for years.

I am actually just as distressed now by things that are NOT ads, but contain constant or time delayed scrolling and other animations on sites. It is EXTREMELY IRRITATING while trying to read something (not to mention battery draining). But web designers seem to think it is cool and mandatory now. Used to be easy- turn off Flash and animated GIF. But since they are all Javascript now, there is no effective way to stop them without breaking the needed parts of pages (and don't EVEN suggest greasemonkey or the like... far to complex and/or time consuming). I wish there was a Firefox plugin that could auto detect Javascript animation or loops and just stop them.