Adblock Plus Can Now Be Rolled Out To Every Single Employee In a Company

New submitter Mickeycaskill writes: Adblock Plus adds large scale deployment (LSD) to version 1.9 of its software, allowing IT managers to block adverts on thousands of computers in one go, months after a German court ruled the practice was legal. The move is likely to concern online publishers who rely on advertising to generate revenue.

Comments

It's not the adverts in themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

but the fact that you smear them all over my face, and that I can't connect to just YOUR website, but I effectively connect to fifteen OTHER sites to download scripts, just to make YOUR website run correctly. I use Ghostery and Ad-Block not because I am against advertising, but because I want a leaner and more tolerable web.

I understand the web is more complex today than a decade ago, but there MUST be a way to make today's websites better in these regards.

Re:It's not the adverts in themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Structure them in a way that they cannot be used as an attack vector and only then will I think about removing AdBlock. No Flash, no Java, and if you assault my eyes with flashing GIFs and CSS fly-overs, I'm taking my eyeballs and money elsewhere.

Re:It's not the adverts in themselves

[Runaway1956]

Yes, of course it is. If I'm browsing YOUR site, then I've implied that I have some trust in YOUR site. Cross site scripting demands that I also trust those other ten, twenty, fifty, or maybe even thousand other sites. If you demand that kind of trust, then I don't need your site. Drive-by installation of malware is far to common for us to trust all those unidentified sites.

Re:It's not the adverts in themselves

[DickBreath]

I think advertisers SHOULD NOT BE RUNNING CODE on my computer.

If you must show me an ad, that's one thing. To ask to run code on my computer is quite something else. Malware has been spread through ad networks, and I promise you it will be again. And again.

Advertisers have only themselves to blame that people block ads. At first web ads were more than tolerable. I was happy to see them, knowing they paid the bills. Then it got worse. And worse. Sites started having tiny bits of content surrounded by ads and you had to click the Next button twenty times to read a ten paragraph article that turns out to be devoid of real information. And other things I could go on about.

Online publishers ought to be careful of the ad networks they get into bed with. Those ad networks should be careful about the actual advertisers. Some of these ads are outright deceptive -- trying to imitate the look of a dialog box on a certain widely used OS. That kind of clever behavior turns out to be bad for ALL advertisers in the long run.

I did say I actually liked the idea that ads paid the bill in the early days. Now I view ads as a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Many of the advertisers have absolutely no sense of shame or restraint. They would tattoo advertisements to the insides of our eyelids if they could. Yes, really.

Re:Great timing

[johanw]

What video ad? :-)

Re:Ugh

[Blue Stone]

Ad blocking was born in response to the arms race advertisers launched (and lets be fair here, also the websites that hosted them) where their ads became increasingly intolerable, obnoxious, disturbing and disruptive (to simple reading comprehension, never mind anything else). This behaviour *necessitated* a response; intitially simple pop-up blockers (now integrated into browsers AS STANDARD!) and gradually moving forward.

If anything, we've seen a lull in hostilities for the past few years as ad blockers have proved very successful, limited only by their install base.

The next round will probably involve websites refusing to show content until adblocking software is disabled (seen here and there already) and if/as this becomes more prevalent, ad blockers responding with stealthing mechanisms.

Since users ultimately own the rendering device, I'm not certain the advertisers can ever win. And god knows, they lost the moral argument long, long ago.

I'd Like the Old Internet Back Please

[lazarus]

I don't care what happens to websites that rely on advertising revenue to stay alive. I preferred the "web" when the content was provided by enthusiasts, not corporate clowns. And yes, that definitely includes this web site.

I don't feel even the slightest bit of shame for blocking ads. You use technology against me. I'll use it against you.