Slashdot Mirror
Adblock Plus Developers To Allow 'Acceptable' Ads
First time accepted submitter Roman Grazhdan writes "Developers of Adblock Plus, an award-winning add-on for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome boasting over 12,000,000 users, announced that starting from version 2.0 the extension would come with a white list of unobtrusive, privacy-respected ads. These will be allowed by default; users will still be able to block them by unchecking 'Allow non-intrusive advertising.' The developers say: 'Only 25% of the Adblock Plus users seem to be strictly against any advertising.' What is this — betrayal of ideals of annoyance-free web or birth of independent authority for standards for advertisement?" Ads are sometimes annoying, but they also make certain websites (like this one!) possible. Getting the balance right is tricky — I know I often avoid sites because of interstitial advertising, pop-ups, etc. Whitelisting sounds like a good way to reward sites that try to keep it subtle; offloading and generalizing the task of categorizing ads into annoying or acceptable gives sites and advertisers a good threshold to duck beneath. Next step I'd like to see: a sliding scale, so browsers can be set to zero, or eleven, for tolerable annoyance. Update: 12/13 14:54 GMT by T : My fault: I liked the story so much that I missed it the first time.
I have a deja vu feeling, and it is not an ad.
maybe we need a Dupeblock Plus?
I can't really state anything but like my subject says, I believe they got paid off by someone to do this. I fear that their hard work probably wasn't seen as a cash flow of significance. I don't buy the only "25% against any advertising" mantra. I think a lot of people, myself included, will be looking for another advertisement blocking plugin. I pay for Slashdot, not much, but I do pay. I pay for what I read.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
Instead, work on a new app: Dupe Block Plus...
The ministry of adblocking, which displays advertisements.
In all seriousness though, who thought this was a good idea? We use adblock to block advertisements. I do not want the developers deciding for me which advertisements will not be blocks; the only person who should control the whitelist is me.
Palm trees and 8
As I said before, though, I'm OK with this. I don't use ABP to stick it to The Man; I use it because a number of my ads either actually make my browser unusable or are annoying enough to seriously detract from my browsing experience. If ABP can block only these while letting more benign ads through, then I applaud them: it allows site owners who don't employ these ads to keep their revenue, and it provides a clear alternative for site owners who currently do employ these ads. That's the sort of thing that actually stands a chance of making some change.
In fact, I wish this weren't optional. There's a difference between protesting against certain odious forms of advertising and simply stealing content. The people who run this just to stick it to The Man are not allies in that fight.
Until someone releases an Adblock 2?
Most sites simply just don't understand that ads and sub services aren't acceptable to a large portion of their userbase.
I'd like separate options for suppressing:
- Pop-unders
- Pop-overs
- Ads emitting sound without being clicked on
- Ads that start playing video without being clicked on
- Ads that are sneaky (single-pixel, etc.)
- etc.
Usually webcomic artists, who come right out and state that their ad revenue is their primary source of income generation. I'll even click through ads on those web sites. But in exchange, I expect those webmasters to patrol their own ads, and if anything is offensive or obnoxious, have it removed at the source. Web ads, even automated ones, should not be a totally passive thing on the part of the webmasters. If they're asking people to click their ads, then they need to make some effort to supervise the ad process.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I'm not 100% anti-advertising, but the privacy issue is deeper than just being on a "Do not track" list.
If the ad is served from a host controlled by the advertiser, then they have my IP address, the date and time, the number of times I saw the ad, and (by the "referer" header) what page(s) I was viewing when I saw the ad.
For me, "acceptable" ads are those served by servers which I've opted into correspond with, either by typing into the address bar or by clicking a link.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I love ads on the sites I visit. Without them, these websites look empty. Anyone like me?
Been a while since we've had one of these.
On TV, you see product placement in TV shows all the time, because of DVRs. Some shows are rampant with them, like Big Bang Theory, which must get a pile of money from Dell. Laptops are ALWAYS carried around with the Dell or Alienware showing.
Or you get websites like Slashdot, which show advertiser bias in the bizarre choices of stories, clearly designed to get click rates up, or the new "sponsored" stories.
I'd rather see unbiased media and unobtrusive ads, then see ads blocked and the whole internet get as bad as /. in that regard.
This was a wise move for the overall health of the web, but the people who use Adblock instead of NoScript + Flashblock are the types who are offended by seeing ads at all. With this user base trait in mind, it would have been best to have the "allow unobtrusive ads" off by default, and maybe show a post-install screen explaining the feature and offering the option to turn it on.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Look websites, we get it, the social contract. I would be fine helping you out by watching your ads. But the ads on your site, aren't from you, they are from an adfarm, or an adhosting company, or any number of third parties I do not know or trust.
Although not a tech site, everyone here has probably heard of the NY Times third party ad supplier getting hit, and injecting an attack to visitors from a poisoned advertisement. *
I use Adblock mostly in self defense, along with NoScript, because I don't know who is pushing the ads, or what their policies are. If AdBlock is going to vet advertisers and guarantee safe content, then maybe I will loosen up a bit. But I'm still leery, as even certificate authorities these days are getting gamed.
In general blocking anything except the web content I'm trying to view, seems best practice.
* http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2009/09/14/fake-antivirus-attack-hits-york-times-website-readers/
I've seen people express that opinion and it's nonsense. Remember the internet before the first banner ad, before the web even? It was as *awesome* resource in the 1980's. It hadn't been corrupted by money and commercial interests. There was no astroturfing, you could believe reviews were a real person's opinion about 100% of the time. There were excellent resources to answer questions about a huge range of things without the $$$ sites offering to sell you shit you didn't need infesting everything. Your every move was not tracked and used to sell you shit.
So if we kill internet ads entirely, and all this crap disappears from the net? That's no loss. That's a gain. Let it all die, I say. Yes, this site too, if that's what it means: usenet of yore before the commercial spammers ruined that too had FAR better tech discussions than slashdot. Maybe the net can go back to what it was before TBL invented the web to make it usable by idiots, attracting legions of idiots, marketeers, censors, and mouth-breathing people clicking on ads to infest it.
Just remembered an interesting observation about laptops in use in the "real world" versus the media. In movies, they tend to use Apple products. However, when the now infamous "war room" photo of Obama, the generals, and the cabinet circulated at the time of Osama Bin Laden's capture, every laptop in the room was a ruggedized, locked down, extra-secure business HP system.
As for the Dells in Big Bang Theory, that really reeks of false geekery to me. Real geeks will either be using Macbook Pros, or some really souped up Windows or Linux system from anyone but Dell.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
If ABP makes money off this deal (and I don't understand why they would do this without making money...), I'm sure their principles of only "allowing non-intrusive ads" will last five minutes until the right price is reached and then they'll allow them, too.
What I don't understand is why the ad biz would try to do business with them -- short term, it's extortion -- pay us and we might unblock your ads. Long-term, you'll pay them and people will switch to BlockAdPlus or whatever the replacement is that does the same thing with the same blocklists but doesn't allow ads.
Either way, the advertisers get squeezed and don't get a lot of long-term satisfaction out of it.
I just hope that this doesn't happen to NoScript. I see that system as much more complex to replace than AdBlock. I could be wrong, but ABP seems more of an URL filter for a page, where NoScript seems to need do more heavy lifting.
I didn't bother for a long time, partially because I use a lot of different browsers for different needs and that meant that I needed to setup and ad-filtering proxy which is a tiny amount of work and I am very very lazy.
But ads got so annoying over time that I just installed it, made it the default on my home network (all HTTP traffic is filtered) and not just am I not annoyed anymore by ads, the speed has gone up.
Ads take just to much time. It doesn't matter where they are. Trying to read an American magazine is a game of "hunt the article". It used to be article - ad - article. Now the article between several ad pages, often only part of the page and spread all over the magazine to force you to keep hunting for it and be exposed to more ads. TV? 5 minutes of ads for every 10 minutes of TV? Including ads for the program you just interrupted?
That leads me to the next thing about ads. They are so goddamn fucking stupid. A tiny handful are funny but they are shown maybe a handful of times. The ads that are in every single commercial block are the ones that make your brain want to crawl out of your ears. I don't watch TV anymore, not because I am not in the mood for mindless drivel but because even my desire for mindless drivel is insulted when the ads come on.
Ad-block can start to let ads through but lets face it, they do this for money and so, the ad that pays the most is the one that gets through. That is how all this kinda stuff works. Movie TV channels advertise with not showing ads, and then charge a premium for special offer blocks. You buy a DVD not to see ads and then they put non-skippable ads in front of the content.
It is not like there are no alternatives to ad-block.
If advertisers want to get back on my browser they need to sanitize their own industry. Get rid of all the animated ads, the ads that are slow or stupid or annoying and make them be delivered at insanely high speeds so that NEVER EVER a webpage refuses to load because of a slow ad server.
But that won't never happen and so, I got several block lists. Opera has the most userfriendly at the moment, can even be used to content on the site itself.
I have even gone to the trouble of filtering out comments on sites with drivel comments. It is easy, just write a javascript command to hide blocks with author "smallfurrycreature" and the net will be a cleaner place.
Yes, this is drivel, but at least it isn't drivel tracking your every move or taking ages to load.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The internet cannot exist without ads.
Imagine if every site above personal hobby projects required you to pay to use its content. Imagine if there was not a single news site that did not charge a subscription cost. Imagine if XKCD charged a subscription cost and Google charged 25 cents to make a search.
That is where we would be without advertising and anyone not willing to help out at all because of some set of principals are just lazy bums and should stop leaking off of everyone around them.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The only way that I'll accept ads is if they're hosted by the site that I'm visiting.
Sure pop-up, pop-under, flash, and all of the other obnoxious forms of advertising that advertisers have come up with are annoying. Yet I am willing to put up with the inconvenience if there was some guarantee of privacy. And advertising (as it stands today) is one of the multitude of ways that users can be tracked across the multitude of sites that they visit.
So blocking it shall be.
Remember back in the day when you could trust ads to be unobtrusive? Then the Internet came along and suddenly advertisers decided that they had free reign to ruin websites and invade our privacy. At this point, I do not trust any advertisers to respectfully show ads; they all either track everything I do or try to get in the way of what I am trying to read, or both. When advertisers regain my trust, I will stop blocking their ads.
Palm trees and 8
I really can't see any problem with them getting paid off. Unless you are an anti-capitalist, getting support this way is legit in my opinion. Just uncheck everything.
To hell with this, I am one of the 25%. I am strictly against ads.
Question: But what about Slashdot? Answer: I block ads on Slashdot.
Question: But what if your favourite website shuts down? Answer: Who cares?
Question: Do you have an alternate way to make money on the web? Answer: Who cares, it's not my responsibility to prop up a failing business model.
Question: Would you be willing to pay to use the websites you block ads on? Answer: No. Free and no ads. Those are my terms and conditions.
Question: But what about TV, the movies, radio, in-store, billboards? Answer: I don't subscribe to pay TV anymore, I pirate or wait for DVDs and buy and rip those. I hate product placement in TV shows. I rarely go to the theatre anymore. I rip all my DVDs/Blus so I don't see previews. I only listen to public radio. I try to do most of my shopping online. None of this has negatively impacted my life in any way, I'm not sacrificing anything here. My (pop) culture experience is at least as good as anyone else's. My city has very few billboards and I hate those. If I could wear augmented reality adblocking glasses, I'd do that. I don't want advertising.
All ads are intrusive by definition. If I want information about a product, I will look for it myself. I don't /EVER/ want any unsolicited product information. I don't care if it's text, video, audio, interactive, whether it's a statement of fact, an outcome of research, an image campaign, or anything else. I'm not an anarchist or a political extremist. I have a normal social life, with normal friends. I'm not anti-capitalist or anti-corporate. Advertising, in specific, is the problem. It's pollution. It's noise. It's garbage.
There have been a few sites which will complain if you block their ads but not many. I'm surprised that there hasn't been a more wholesale backlash against ad blockers given that visitors who block ads are basically freeloaders. It would be fairly simple to test if ads are being blocked or not with some inline JS and take the appropriate action. What that might be is open to discussion but I expect there are ways to devalue the content commensurate with the devalued visitor, e.g. don't show any news articles in the last 12 hours for example.
At this point I'm guessing that the license plate still garbed in the pristine shrink-wrap Steve Jobs couldn't bear to tear into has come up for sale on eBay.
So it was boring then and it's still boring now, but finally we have geek quorum.
Oh oh, even worse, its about some Twitter celebrity I've never heard of.
Three strikes, you're out.
Since I missed it myself the first time, I'll add my two percents.
I grew up in the era of Coke vs Pepsi. The debate should have been about high fructose corn syrup vs metabolic syndrome. You hear from the man standing under the elephant, but it's never about the diabetic ankles.
One of missing gems from Five Equations That Changed the World:
information + greed + sex appeal = toxic sludge
The dynamic here is that whatever standard one sets for acceptable advertising conduct, the advertisers are incented to differentiate themselves by crowding the perimeter of bad taste. The bad behaviour doesn't end until the acceptance criteria is reduced to the null set of "don't call us, we'll call you". There's plenty of people out there who enjoy the mind rot, the same way many people are into body rot. Advertising is best applied to these people.
The spectacular increase in metabolic syndrome in the western world over the last thirty years can't possibly be genetics. It could perhaps be caused by people parking the salty and sugary chip truck on their front lawn thinking they'll not really notice its presence there.
Sure, it wasn't the internet YOU know and love, but in many ways, it was a better place. Now get off my lawn.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
... "Acceptability" is determined by the amount of cash transferred from the the advertiser to ABP...
This post brought to you by Dell.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Excuuuuse me if I'm "so last millenium", but what are ads? I browse the web with `links`in gorgeous 149col x 143rows of text!
I think it's a reasonably good idea to allow users the option to let some ads through. A lot of people think advertising is a legitimate way to fund Web sites and maybe they want to preserve the revenue streams of sites that advertise in an inoffensive way.
Myself, I think all advertising is contemptible by definition, so I am also glad the developers preserve the option to block everything.
I don't see this as a betrayal of the user community. I see it as adding a feature. Yeah it's a feature that is enabled by default but if you are smart enough to use AdBlock in the first place you are probably smart enough to configure it.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I have no beef whatsoever with unobtrusive text ads, or a reasonable number of static graphical ads. The reason I end up eventually installing AdBlock on my browsers is where some badly designed website brings my browser to a crawl with a half-dozen animated ads, or, even worse, a video ad with the sound enabled by default. (And most video ads in general make my machine chug some...)
This sounds like they are going to do the same thing search engines do the more you pay the more your ads will appear. Just like search engines the more you pay the higher you rank. The company needed revenue and this is how they decided they were going to make money. A lot of company's that offer free services get people hooked the first few years then start with the revenue stream ideas. Apple did with the iPhone they got everyone hooked on the phone then introduced iAd and guess what we all kept our iPhones. If people like the service enough they will just put up with the changes. How ever the post goes on to talk about unchecking 'Allow non-intrusive advertising' to not allow a white list. So this does show they are trying to keep the products integrity and the products main purpose.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
There's more.
If I make a considered personal opinion that I'm crossing high-fructose corn sugar and most soy derivatives off my menu for now and forever, because the superficial culinary joy is outweighed by the metabolic tax, and because I dislike mega-corporation agriculture, and because I *really* dislike mega-corporation agriculture as pwned by Monsanto under their regulatory capture of having the FDA "generally recognize as safe" a shot-gun genetic modification technology (which scatters the injected gene throughout the chromosomes) then to enter my house, as a principle of courtesy and respect, the visitor should scrape this particular dog shit off their shoes before stepping onto my porch.
Until advertising incorporates the "I have decided" list of things I personally never wish to hear from again, I'm not unlocking the front gate, if only to protect my porch, even if I don't open the door after they ring the bell.
As a consumer, I'm never allowed to set a fixed policy. In their mind I'm permanently up for suasion and drift. They understand decision fatigue and wield it against me.
Another decision I've made is to never purchase a condiment which contains 40% of my sodium RDA in a single tablespoon. Does the cash register access my file to help me enforce this firm personal decision when I pass the till. Not bloodly likely. I'm surrounding by B2B technology of the highest order, yet I have to personally flip over every stupid bottle and read it myself.
Capitalism where art thou?
For whatever reason product placement doesn't particularly bother me. When I see a close-up of a phone or a shoe in a movie or TV show, I know that it is a form of advertising but it doesn't detract from my viewing. Probably because the actual time of advertisement is on the order of a second or less. When it is just a brief glimpse that requires no interaction on my part I can tolerate it. What I can't stand are commercials that you have to sit through on TV, or worse, commercials you have to sit through to view a web page or online video. If the advertisement presents itself and then disappears very briefly without interrupting me or requiring input on my part, that is just fine. When the ad requires me to click it to go away, click it to continue, blocks what I am trying to do, or wastes my time, that is unacceptable and I will always either block it or stop using the service that employs it.
I will probably allow those non-intrusive ads. I don't mind those, I already disable them on my favorite sites like this one.
I agree that they should allow ads, there is a lot of good ads
We need a search engine for websites that do not use ads. One which doesn't crawl blogs. A few other things.
Yeah. I think I'll create one. Going to make its operational expenses very simple -> it'll use BitCoins to pay for the monthly traffic. So long as the balance remains positive, the site stays up.
I favor this approach, as Google / Bing / Yahoo are already unusable to me. If I am doing CS work, searching for information on an algorithm, I don't want 300 sites trying to sell me a book on that very algorithm. I already own the book, and the information I want is not in it.
I am John Hurt.
Is an ad blocking method that lets the ads load to make the sites and advertisers happy, and also blocks them from being visible to the surfer - win win.
I'm fine with people getting revenue for their ads. I just don't want to see them. All I want is a simple ad hiding extension, something that will suppress the viewing and hearing of the ad. Is that too much to ask for?
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
It seems like they went to a lot of trouble writing a whitelist mechanism and the associated whitelist distribution method, when there was already a mechanism to implement it - letting the user choose which blocklist subscription to use. ABP already asks you which list to use, so just put out a list that doesn't block the well-behaved ads and another list that does.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I would like say, "no sound", "no video/animated gifs", "no flash", etc etc.
Also I would like to specify what I am currently in the market for, "digital SLR", "Carib Cruise" etc
Also I would like to say what I would not click at "singles" "sexual stuff", "gambling" etc
I would like some site like Mozilla to offer me list of these choices in some web site. I go there and I check mark on or off of these items. That site hashes all these choices into a simple hash and gives it to me. I send that hash to all sites I visit. That site can use the hash fetch my ad acceptance policy and displays ads accordingly.
I would like the site that hashing my preferences into hash to make it available for others. So when I first visit the site, I get a choice of most popular policies number of people using that set of options. I clone one of the popular ones, make a few adjustments and get a new hash for myself.
Eventually the web sites would know what kind of ads would be accepted by majority of the users and what would not be. With this feedback we can give good guys some decent break. That is the only way to make the annoying irritants go away.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
ABP already had a mechanism to let you choose what ads to block and what ads not to block - it's the blocklist subscription choice that you make when you install/update ABP. Instead of putting in a whitelist, they could have just offered a choice of blocklists beyond the current "Ads in English" / "Ads in French" / etc. choice. Maybe this makes it easier for the ABP authors to get everybody to use the less strict list.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
> If we block all advertising that isn't self hosted, we'll get
> server-side systems that automatically copy adds from advertisers
> servers and then share tracking info back to the advertiser.
But the site I choose to visit would be a layer between my data and the harvester.
That changes everything because, not only could they decide to not pass on the data or to scramble identifying elements before passing it on, but they would also share responsibility - which means they would be answerable to questions about what is being collected, and could be criticised for nasty policies.
Adblock would continue to work. It'd just need regex's (which I think it already uses).
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
It's easy to get used to most ads, except the crazy ones that flash red and green every 0.1 second. Don't mind them, and I've clicked a couple of them over the last six months.
The problem is slow third-party servers that take 10 seconds to process a request. Don't you too hate staring at a white screen and a status bar that says "Waiting for google-analytics.com..."? Google and other ad providers have immense global networks which are very hard to manage, and they don't seem to be able to keep all their servers smoothly. That would be extremely expensive, if not impossible.
It would be very useful to have a "temporary adblock" plugin that blocks third-party junk while the page is loading, and fills it in after the page is loaded, while the computer is idle. Maybe Google or its users (including ./) have gotten smarter about where they put their javascript, because I haven't seen the 5-10second stops lately.
I think you're wrong about what roll websites would have if all advertising was self hosted: they wouldn't have any roll because they'd simply be running a server side advertising system written by the advertising companies. Google Adds would simply require a PHP script you drop into your site -- not a script you would create or could change. Users can already easily tell websites they don't like the advertising, but the Adblock Plus change will let us tell the _advertisers_ what's going to far.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
Had ads remained a small banner at the top of pages, originating from the site in question, no animations, no javascript, no cookie tracking, etc ... this arms race would never have come about in the first place. They may have even been effective in getting people curious about their product and checking it out.
Let me decide what is "acceptable" for me.
Using Adblock reeks of hypocrisy to me. "I like the content your site provides, and I like it enough to go to your site, but you choose to pay for your site through ads, which I don't like, so I'm going to block them."
I first thought of this when I used Adblock and I visited Distrowatch and a bunch of images were missing. It turned out that the site owner does things to deliberately mess with the folks who use Adblock with huge block lists. I thought about it and realized he is right. I like Distrowatch, it costs me nothing, yet I'm going to block the ads that support it? Not right.
Yeah a lot of sites have annoying ads. I don't visit them. I used to read the Denver Post's website. It has annoying pop unders. I stopped visiting. I have sent emails to other sites saying "I like your content, your ads are too annoying, so I stopped visiting."
I also pay for websites that have good content that is worth paying for.
Penny - plain text accounting
I not only don't have a problem with product placement, I think it makes the show more realistic. Look at "My Name Is Earl" and the phony beer. IMO it would have been a lot better if they'd have used the redneck beer of choice, Bud Light. Made-up brands detract from a show, product placement adds to it.
Free Martian Whores!
Internet ads are not like advertisement you see in TV or anywhere else. Instead of using smart, clever, easy-to-remember or catchy advertisement, it's usually a simple image or very intrusive pieces of code that put said images in front of you.
Those ads barely follow basic marketing guidelines, and offer nothing to catch my interest. Hence, I block them, unless want to support that site (most sites I visit daily, actually, but that's not relevant to this post)
TV ads and derivatives usually depend on catchy tunes, imagery and cleverness*. Nothing you can find in internet ads.
Also, I am mostly influenced by ads when I go buy groceries. Internet ads will never advertise something I can go grab at my local market, or something I feel compelled to try, even less something I can obtain with pocket change. I am not buying a 200â+ service or item just because a rectangle with pictures asked me to click on it (or worse, interrupt or bother me).
Not to mention, that Google, famous ad provider we all know and love, with all their datamining efforts, scanning email and searches for keywords, and all that fancy stuff, in order to provide ads, still fails to see I am not interested on random dating sites or buying server space. All these years and Google still fails to see I am only interested in videogames, cooking and free software. Not even once I saw an advertisement related to those 3 things from Google.
Or considering 80% of my twitter followers are Japanese (I don't know why either), and Google surely has the tools and data to know that, how about offering a freaking translation suite or dictionary? You know, something I might find useful, instead of renting servers or shady dating sites.
*Yeah, I know there are dumb as f*ck TV ads everywhere, but you surely remember a few funny or good ads from any period in time. If you remember, they succeeded.
I tried to retract the post somehow, but failed to find it yesterday (the 'newest' was full of proposals to buy real estate in India)