Slashdot Mirror
We Asked Doc Searls: Do Ad Blockers Cause Cancer? (Video)
A whimsical headline, but not much more of a shark-jumper than some of the talk we've heard lately from ad agencies, online publishers, and others who earn their living from online advertising. Doc Searls recently wrote a piece on his personal blog titled Beyond ad blocking — the biggest boycott in human history. Naturally, we wanted to ask Doc to expand a bit on what he's been writing about ad blocking and advertising in general. So we had a fine conversation about online advertising -- ending with a challenge to the advertising industry, which Doc says should be looking for ways to produce better, more effective, and less annoying ways to sell to us online.
Do Ad Blockers Cause Cancer?
No. But videos on Slashdot do.
I use Ad-Block's element-hiding add-on to get rid of not merely ads, but various other elements I dislike — including the incessant newsletter sign-up invitations, footers full of legalese, persistent "navigation" menus, "share-bars" and "article-tools" (thank you, I can increase the font without your little icon), weather-widgets, "related articles", "back-to-top" (seriously, who needs these on a desktop??), "next" and "previous" arrows — all of that crap...
In fact, I'm addicted. Upon coming to a new (or recently redesigned) site, I must clean it up before reading. Web-browsing without AdBlocker is just scary nowadays. And revolting...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
... AdBlockPlus
Ghostery
Greasemonkey
HTTPS Everywhere
NoScript
Privacy Badger
Because running code on somebody else's computer without consent is trespass to chattels.
NO TRESPASSING!
Yeah, I hate it when that 95% of them ruin it for everyone else.
Yup, I'm sure Ad Blockers can cause cancer. Just the other day I saw an ad "beat cancer with one weird trick" and followed it and paid and now I won't get cancer, but all those people who blocked the ad will!
One day, I had a Slashdot page still opened in my browser, locked my screen, went to lunch. Came back to complaints that my computer was annoying everyone in the office -- delayed auto-playing video ads were the culprit. So thanks to Slashdot (and me wanting to keep my job), I now have adblock installed.
Oh, not to mention the 3 times in the past I got a nasty computer virus due to an infected ad network. These are now no longer a worry.
Before we get the whining from the ad peddlers: YOU killed your golden goose. Not us. YOU killed it off yourself with the proverbial greed that the story about the original goose conveys.
There were ads and we accepted them as part of the deal. They were non-intrusive and they didn't bother us too much. We thought "fair vs. fair" and didn't block them. Yes, there were always the ones that block anything and everything "on principle" but the majority of those that knew how to block didn't. And the others didn't block because, well, they had no idea how to.
Then ads got more obnoxious. Maybe because too few clicked them and you wanted more, more, MORE! They started to flash and cause seizures, they started to play loud music, they started to pop up, pop under, pop your eyes out. And people who knew how to block them got fed up enough to do so.
But it took even more effort on your part to be obnoxious invaders of our space to actually drive those that didn't know anything about blocking to find out about it. And that's something, you know? The average Joe Randomsurfer puts up with a lot. A LOT. Before the average computer illiterate starts asking his friend about his computer "being weird", it usually means that there are SO many browser addon bars installed that you can't even SEE the actual webpage anymore, and starting it means clicking away like a dozen or two windows popping up from some crapware he managed to step in. THAT is what he WILLINGLY puts up with! That does NOT bother him.
Do you have a FAINT idea just HOW MUCH you have to piss someone like this off for him to bother trying to find out how to block it???
And you did that. You managed to piss people off enough who put up with obnoxious browser plugins and on-start popups. That's a feat and a half.
And there is nothing, literally NOTHING you could possibly do to make them uninstall it. You can promise what you want, you can threaten how much you want, they don't give a shit. It takes a herculian effort to move them and get them to do anything, you will not get them to remove their blockers.
And you most certainly won't get anyone who at least has a remote idea of computers to do so either.
You cannot provide your content without ads? Ok. Shut down, the next one offering it is around the corner.
We don't need you. You needed us. You pissed us off. Now be a good little ad asshole and die already!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I hate to defend we advertisers, but this doesn't really make sense here. Even if the "good apples" (hahaha, yeah right) actually got together and decided on standards for web advertising, such as no flashing, no pop-ups, no pop-unders, no auto-starting videos, etc., how exactly would they enforce this?
It's not like it's that hard to code up a pop-up ad. Any decent programmer could probably figure it out in a few hours, even if they don't know JavaScript, and in a few days put together a working ad system using pop-ups and serving ads from someplace.
How would an industry consortium prevent this? Kick out anyone who does it? Oh no! I've been kicked out of the advertisers' club! So what?
The only way this kind of thing could be enforced is by government regulation, and sending in police to physically seize domains and servers found to be violating the law (as this standard would have to be enacted into law for this to happen). And even this is problematic since the web easily crosses national borders.
This is why ad-blocking is popular: there's little chance the government is going to step in and fix it (and why should they?), there's no feasible way for advertisers to police themselves (even if they were so inclined, which I don't think they are), and it's easy enough to just use a technological solution to block almost all ads.
At this point, the only way advertisers are going to get past the ad-blockers is to either buy them all off (which won't work because someone will just fork the existing ones, as we've seen several times now), or resort to serving ads from the same domain or even server as the web page.
Could not agree more. I started looking into blocking only when the flashing and animation insanity started. Blocking was not a lot of effort, but suddenly I could find the web again under all that trash. Will keep blocking, unless they make all ads non-intrusive and they get the problem of malicious ads fixed effectively and permanently. As neither will be happening...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It's how entertainment and media companies survive. What's your alternative model? I don't mind "normal" ads, it's the pop-ups, flash, and JavaScript-dancy crap that cause most the grief. Serve up only HTML and static image ads that don't show gross stuff like rotting toenails, and few will complain.
Table-ized A.I.