Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: To AdBlock Or Not To AdBlock?
Is there an acceptable compromise to behavioral targeting? On the one hand, I don't want to be profiled by unscrupulous advertisers. On the other hand, I feel that the advertiser is the middleman between the things I care about (content) and the dollars that support those things. My compromise is to take a page out of BF Skinner's book, Walden Two, and view the situation as a sort of absurd behaviorist experiment. Basically, I Adblock everything, but whitelist the sites I support. Is this too much? Not enough? What should individuals do protect themselves, if anything at all?
Advertising is evil. No need to rationalize ad blocking. Kick the marketers to the curb and move on. If the site needs another source of revenue, they'll find it be it micropayments, subscriptions, etc. And if you really care about the content you can then pay to get it, and if not, nothing of value is lost.
I hate advertising in all forms, including that from vendors whom I might otherwise like. I'd much rather live in a world without advertising than one with one. So, for me, that's basically the world I live in.
No, I don't care that your revenue depends on advertising. I don't want your buggy whips, even if they're "free," even if you won't give me stuff for "free" unless I take a buggy whip. Find some other way to pay the bills.
And I don't think my attitude is at all outrageous or selfish. Would you accept "free" cake that came topped with "free" output from the sewage plant because that was the only way they could dispose of the waste? Would you feel guilty about decontaminating the cake before eating it? If you couldn't decontaminate the cake, would you still eat it anyway?
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
I AdBlock everything. One, I dislike looking at ads. Two, I dislike business models that are based on ads.
I don't care if AdBlock destroys the Internet as we know it. The Internet as we know it could use a little constructive destruction.
I fully support adblock plus - It's a fully transformative experience compared to browsing without it. Pages load quicker, load without the random long-pauses from faulty ad servers, and from not having to traverse dozens of servers just for a small amount content.
That, and your view is uncluttered with intentionally misleading images, many kinds of annoying sound and images, and countless script-based frustrations that advertisers are ever-increasingly willing to push on their prospective customers.
Simply put, AdBlockers do an amazing job at helping me retain some minimal level comfort that humanity can sometimes retain some motivations greater than misleading manipulation - even if you have to filter your view to extensively to see that sometimes.
Ryan Fenton
It's not like I would ever click one of those ads anyway.
Simply by asking question, you are committed to doing the right thing. Follow your morals.
Also, by my reasoning you are a better person than me. I did not consider unblocking, even after reading this:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love/
... it's that so many times ad-serving networks end up being compromised and send ads that end up installing malware on your computer: if sites ran their own SIMPLE ads (plain images, served by their own website, no flash/iframe/... crap) there would be a lot less problems.
Unfortunately that kind of ad-serving costs more money to do (easier to farm this out to an ad network) and since there are no penalties for doing so (if your ad provider is compromised and thousands of your users get hit by drive-by malware you say "sorry, not responsible, it's the ad provider's fault") that's why we're in the situation we're in where most tech savy people adblock as much as possible to reduce risks, which unfortunately hurts the content providers...
I honestly wish there was some sort of scheme where you could have some sort of microtransaction way to give $$$ to websites you use. Say you like /. a lot, you could decide that every time you visit, you'd pay $0.01 with a maximum of $0.25/day, say you don't like as much another site but you don't want to completely freeload, you could decide you still give them $0.01 but only with a maximum of $0.01/day. It might seem low, but with a lot of users it could add up quite a bit for sites, and I think more than the current ad-based approach.
Yes, this could probably add up to $50-100/month, but I'd be totally willing to pay that because I'd be supporting the sites I chose to, and sites wouldn't have to deal with subscriptions, they'd just get paid by the microtransaction provider once a month (minus of course a flat fee of some sort). The microtransaction providers could compete on fees etc. as long as there was interoperability so users wouldn't have to worry...
-- the cake is a lie
But I do disable animated GIFs, flash and Javascript in my browser. If you can't convey your ad to me in a single static image, I'm not clicking on it. I click through a fair number of Google ads. Often they're exactly what I'm looking for, anyway. The more obnoxious an ad is, the less likely I am to click on it. The more obnoxious a page is, the less likely I am to hang around for very long.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I react very negatively to adverts. The more a company puts it's message in front of me, the less likely I am to buy from them. I instinctively avoid products with heavy TV marketing campaigns, because they can't represent good value for money, given that the cost of the campaign comes out of the price I'm paying.
So I adblock everything... and by doing so, I save advertisers from getting filed under 'I hate those irritating people and won't buy anything from them'. I'm more likely to buy from a company if I don't see their ads than If I do.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
...doesn't understand how the Internet works. On a simpler level, there is no reason that just because I load file A (content I want), I also have to load file B (advertising). My downloading article.html does not make me obligated to download advertisement.png just because there's an image link to it. I will not feel guilted into using my bandwidth to download a single byte I'm not interested in downloading. If I'm stealing, am I also stealing when I use a text mode browser like lynx? Are blind people that use text browsers and a screen reader stealing? If I set Firefox to not download images or turn off JavaScript, am I stealing? If you feel passionately enough about a site that you want to support their ad business model, go ahead and whitelist that site. I feel no need to support any site by downloading things I want. If a site goes out of business because no one looked at its ads, well I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm sure I can find the content I want elsewhere.
When Flash, and flash based advertisements, stop turning my MBP into a toaster. i'll turn off AdBlock.
The End.
I've never blocks ads. However I do block scripts and trackers, which as a consequence blocks a lot of ads anyway.
I don't see why I should open a security vulnerability (client side scripting) just to read a webpage. However I don't have a problem with ads that aren't malicious but those seem to be getting fewer and fewer.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
(a) This is posted to Ask Slashdot, but it's not really a question, it's a plug for the author's answer.
(b) The slashdot summary is incoherent.
(c) TFA consists of an incoherent intro followed by a description of what the author does. To save you the trouble of wading through the incomprehensible text, here's what he does: "#1 -- Disable third-party cookies [...] #2 -- Use Ghostery to block everything indiscriminately, but whitelist the sites I support."
A typical piece of bizarre reasoning, incoherently expressed, from TFA:
This whole thing about the morally correct response to internet advertising has been rehashed over and over on slashdot. Over and over, people have made the same point: internet ads wouldn't be objectionable if they were like ads in a newspaper or magazine, but because they aren't like that, any user with enough know-how is going to block them. I'm sorry, but I just can't read an article while an animated monkey is jumping up and down next to it on the screen.
Text-oriented sites like slashdot are relatively cheap to run, on a per-user basis, so as long as some percentage of their users don't use ad blockers, these sites are viable.
I asked someone I know, who works in online advertising, whether ad blocking is an issue for her company. I told her I never saw ads on the internet and was surprised that anyone was ... well, dumb enough ... to fail to install ad blocking software. Her response: "Do you use Hulu?"
Find free books.
Imagine you are a bee, or a hummingbird. There are all these delicious flower full of yummy nectar... but around them is this icky, nasty, yellow pollen. The flower needs the pollen to be carried around to propagate the species... but you still don't want to get plant jism all over yourself. So you develop strategies to get the nectar without getting pollen on you. The plant, in turn develops strategies to get more pollen on you while not wasting as much precious nectar. No morality about it, it's just nature.
(For the slow: the user is the bird or bee, the flower is the content provider, the nectar is the content, and the pollen is the advertisement.)
I care about my time far too much to spend much effort on such trivial matters.
If spending time thinking about/taking steps to categorize and block sites brings you some pleasure in itself, fine.
Otherwise the fact that you seem to have nothing more important to worry about may be a problem needing more urgent attention.
-Lod
... is advertising that doesn't come across as advertising.
People who say they loathe advertising in any form actually just loathe the bad advertising; the advertising that detracts from what you're trying to do and immediately screams "this is an advertisement, I'm here to interrupt you in some way in the hope that somehow it will get you to buy something even though I've pissed you off."
A few years ago I received an unepxected phone call on my wife's cellphone from a company offering a CDN service. At first I was really pissed off that this company had reached me in such an inappropriate manner ... but the guy on the other end didn't try to sell me anything and the conversation was unlike any telemarketing call that I had ever received. It was personal and appealed to my geeky curiosity (CDNs were very new at the time, the only companies that were using them were heavy traffic movers like Yahoo, so I wanted to know how it worked), it was offering me a solution to a problem I had at the time and the conversation was very informal. Within a minute or two I was actually asking him questions, and that's how it works. And to top it off when I told the guy I wasn't going to buy from him he chuckled and said "I'm not trying to sign you up today, don't worry." It kept me on the phone. I didn't buy but I was impressed enough that if I had chosen to purchase a CDN service within the next little while I probably would have given them a second look.
I still don't like people phoning me, and I think there are far better ways to reach out to people, but everything that transpired within that phone call was an example of marketing done in the right direction.
I'm self-employed, running a high-traffic web-site that generates money via ad revenue for 11 years now, and the people who visit my web-site have no idea that the entire site is one giant advertisement; in fact, people have complimented and praised me for not having any ads on the site. And yet when fellow webmasters in the same industry as myself share their sales and conversion stats I always get a big smile on my face. Their sites are crawling with blatant advertisements and they need 2 to 5 times the traffic to generate the same revenue. I've never understood how pissing off your customers can be regarded as any form of business model.
I think the best well-known type of advertisement that's going in the right direction is product placement. It can be done poorly, yes and I know I am about to get a bunch of replies from people telling me that they always notice it and it ruins the program etc. But it *CAN* be done in a subtle way that blends with the program and does not detract, to the point where the viewer does not notice or care.
But I think the real way to do "advertising" is provide a value to the viewer as the advertisement itself. Imagine an hour long infomercial on television that was entertaining and/or informative enough to get you to watch it for it's own sake, with no intention of buying anything. Remember that "punch the monkey" ad that was on every single web-site a decade ago ? Imagine if that had actually been a real game that you could play. No pushy-ness what-ever. Not shoved in your face and not done as a banner / flash ad. Instead, something people genuinely wanted to play, with an entertaining sales pitch as part of it. Good advertising can be done, and occasionally is. We just don't notice because we're too distracted and pissed off at the "BOO!!! HAHAH! THIS IS ADVERTISEMENT! YOU WILL BUY NOW LOLZ!"
I've practiced "magic"/illusion-performance as a hobby for a few years and in reading/studying I've learned that corporations will often hire magicians at trade-shows to pitch new products to retailers. Some of the better magicians have crafted entire 20-minute magic routines around the product they're hired to pitch. It's entertainment and people want to watch it for that purpose alone, but it's also an advertisement.
That I pay for the bandwidth, so how dare they usurp and use it to serve ads. So I aggressively adblock.
I've almost got all of hulu's ad servers blotted out. And then for standard web browsing I use AdBlock Plus.
Honestly. Look at the agreement between you and them. You are providing eyeballs for a product. When they believe they can track you beyond your eyeballs, there is an issue. You don't HAVE to look at billboards as you drive by them. Why do they think they can throw a GPS tracking device on your car as you drive by? All business transactions are based on equal standing. Especially contract law. You need to be on equal footing for contracts to be honored. That is why some jurisdictions don't see Shrink Wrap EULAs as valid and enforceable. You have no equal footing with something that you already purchased and cannot return, since the package was opened.
When the equation is equal again, you can walk back and deal as an equal, until it is an equal equation, the only way to win is to not play.
Kobayashi Maru
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what is for dinner.
Liberty is a well-armed lamb.
AdBlock Plus just give us lambs better arms.
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
It's all about respect for the free will of the consumer.
If I want to look at ads, let me. If I want them out of my sight, so be it. It's my eyeballs you're trying to market, so you do so on my terms or not at all.
Seriously, nothing pisses me off more than popups or "forced ad views". They get between me and the content I seek to read.
Also, because I never click on ads anyway, it's a waste of CPU and screenspace to show them.
By blocking ads I'm actually saving the site on their bandwidth bills.
Ads should be clearly labeled as ads, stay the hell out of my way when I'm using a site, and if I'm to click on them they also need to be relevant to my interests.
If you want to profile me, and you're willing to respect my privacy, go for it. Pull any underhanded tricks and I'll ditch you so fast your head will spin.
But it is childish and hypocritical.
Not at all. I pay my ISP to get internet access. If that internet access gave me equal bandwidth both in upload and download capacity, and adhered to network neutrality, there would be no need to pay for anything else other than internet access. The internet didn't come about because of advertising, or commercial interests. It doesn't need either to sustain itself. Protocols could easily be designed to share content, just like bittorrent does now. Bittorrent doesn't need advertising, and it can move a lot of data. More than anything a typical webpage costs in bandwidth. If the concept was extended so that websites I access frequently I could sign up to cache their content and redistribute it on a network model like bittorrent, which was what the web was designed to do, albeit less efficiently, being a "version 1.0" -- then there would be little need for servers, data centers, advertising, etc.
This isn't a "something for nothing" argument, this is a "cooperation costs less than competition" argument. The internet was not designed as a client/server model: TCP/IP is a peer to peer protocol. It's the ultimate in electronic democracy... and corporations and commercial interests have been fighting it, beating on it, manipulating it, and fucking it up as much as possible to shoehorn their own outdated business models on it.
The internet not only doesn't need advertisements: It doesn't need advertising companies, servers, data centers, clouds, businesses, corporations, governments... it doesn't need any of that. We could, in fact, create a wireless global network based on internet protocols and do away with ISPs entirely, if we were so motivated.
So don't give me that "something for nothing" argument, because that's what they're doing. They're allowed to freeload on my internet connection to support their broken business model. If enough people block advertising, move away from ISPs that don't enforce network neutrality, and demand the government do something about it... we might actually get the network back that we originally designed, the network that is full of possibilities, open protocols, and universal access to all of humanities collective knowledge and experience.
Or... you can be a consumer and eat whatever they feed you.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The big problem with ads is that sites keep increasing the number of ads per page or per unit time until the number of users drops off substantially. CBS actually admitted that they cranked up the number of commercials on their on-line shows until the usage started to drop.
There are limits to this, as Myspace found out the hard way. At some point, users revolt and go elsewhere. Facebook seems to be following Myspace in that regard, as "sponsored stories" and larger ads chew up more of the screen. Google started with small blocks of ads on the right of search results, but now there are ads at the right, top, and bottom of search results.
As a counter to that, I did Ad LImiter, which is a reaction to Google and Bing putting too many ads and paid results on search results. You get to select how many ads you want to see per page. The default is 1. You can set it to zero, but one Google ad is often useful. Think of it as moderation, applied to advertisers.
I'd like to see more tools like that. It would induce advertisers to produce better, more relevant ads, if they were competing against other ads for some criterion beneficial to the user. Google selects the ads to show based on an algorithm designed to optimize Google's revenue. This is not necessarily optimal for either user or advertiser.
It mystifies me that so many intelligent people are so wrong about where content comes from. I'm an online journalist. I've been an online journalist for 11 years. Advertising revenue is what pays the bills.
Blocking ads isn't immoral. It doesn't make you a bad person. But if everyone did it, a whole heck of a lot of websites wouldn't exist. This point stands regardless of what anyone thinks of my content or the content at websites I've written for. If you like a website because it publishes solid, well-researched articles, those articles take time and money to create. Good journalism takes time and money to create.
If you block ads and *don't* subscribe or cut a check every so often, than yes, that's a problem. There are stories that don't get written because investigating them is too costly. It sucks to be in a situation where you've got your hands on something interesting, but you literally can't afford to follow it up. Opting out of advertising has an impact on sites you care about.
And for the record? I hate ads, too.
If this is the case, then adblock just needs the option to download the content for the ad, but not display it. The websites get the cash, and the advertisers aren't aware that their content never actually reached the public.
I block Javascript across the board, but all static images are allowed through. If your site displays the ads as static images that do not require any javascript then I'm fine with your ads and don't mind if I see them. I'm actually pretty shocked at how few ads I actually see given that plain old images are allowed.
The alternative would be something like the BBC, where I'd have to pay $230 a year to watch NBC. $230 a year to watch ABC. $230 a year to watch CBS. And on and on and on.
No the BBC model is far better than that: you pay £145.50 each year to watch the BBC. This consists of multiple channels of high quality HD content plus an online service that lets you download content to watch offline later. You then get ITV, Channel 4 etc. thrown in for free with ads.
If they would let me do that from Canada I'd take them up in a flash. As it is my only option for anything close is to pay $880 (~£550) per year for cable to get the same amount of quality content split over 100 channels and interspersed with ads and low quality rubbish. The only channel that comes close in terms of quality is the CBC but it only provides one english-speaking channel and is severely hampered by lack of funding.
The BBC is by no means perfect and the funding model certainly has its flaws but the end result is something with a higher quality and lower cost than anything I have yet seen in any of the countries I've lived in.
Saying that it's ok to use the government to limit speech is evil, whether it's commercial speech or not. Using technology to block annoying people from speaking to you is just fine, even if that technology is a third-party service. Using technology to block technically bad advertising systems is not just fine, it's really nice!
I started running ad-blockers because too many ads were [BLINK]annoying animated gifs[/BLINK], which have since mutated into resource-burning browser-crashing Flash and Javascript ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, float-around-thingies, and other annoyances YELLING FOR MY ATTENTION. I'm not very bothered by Google text ads or even low volumes of non-singing non-dancing static image ads, but there's no obvious convenient way to block the annoying ones without blocking the well-behaved ones. (Sorry, Google, but I'm not going to bother using non-obvious non-convenient tools just to enable ads, even for sites I like.)
I also run ad-blockers and Ghostery because there's too much tracking going on. I don't want lots of random measurement systems watching everything I could do and deciding how they can monetize my user experience by selling tracking data to people who want to show me ads. If your web page wants to run trackers in your domain, fine, but leave the third-party stuff out of it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks