German Publisher Axel Springer Bans Adblocking Users From Bild Website (axelspringer.de)

Isn't this a no brainer? by iapetus · 2015-10-13 01:37 · Score: 5, Funny

It's why I don't use ad blocking software or disable ads on Slashdot.

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++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.

Re:Isn't this a no brainer? by Mashiki · 2015-10-13 01:41 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's why I don't use ad blocking software or disable ads on Slashdot.
Most people wouldn't use ad blocking if the advertisers didn't allow malware laden ads be served to their PC's turning them into mindless drones for a botnet. They could fix that problem easily by turning around and vetting ads. Or if the ads weren't so obtrusive and annoying either. Bet we'll see within 3 months that they're reversing this stance, or within a year it shuts down.

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Om, nomnomnom...
Re:Isn't this a no brainer? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-13 01:41 · Score: 5, Informative

It's a no brainer to block all ads and adblock-detecting scripts as well. I went there and could access all normal content with uBlock + noscript.
Re:Isn't this a no brainer? by tiberus · 2015-10-13 01:46 · Score: 4, Interesting

Not using an ad-blocker but, I have noticed that the ads have become much more intrusive lately, so I happily disable ads whenever I can. As the disable feature was instituted by /. and a user must contribute (in what the community deems) in a positive manner, I have no qualms about using the feature. I can't imagine the "Good Folks (tm)" at /. biting the hand that feeds them. I strongly suspect that the positive effect of those users posts far outweighs any 'lost' revenue.
Re:Isn't this a no brainer? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-13 01:46 · Score: 5, Insightful

exactly, adblock has become more important that antivirus
Re:Isn't this a no brainer? by aaarrrgggh · 2015-10-13 02:02 · Score: 5, Insightful

To be honest, I think it has more to do with page load times for most. The ads might be intrusive, but now with adblocking on my iPad pages load quickly, even with spotty Internet. The bidding game the advertisers were playing is a big part of their downfall.
The tracking does have its "creepy" factor, with ads following you from site to site... Despite having already made whatever purchase was under consideration.
Re:Isn't this a no brainer? by Gr8Apes · 2015-10-13 02:19 · Score: 5, Informative

The biggest issue with their ads is that I don't ever click on them even if I see them. I'm the "don't look for something until I need it, then I buy it" kind of person. So, let's say I'm looking for a chair. I'll do my research, and likely purchase a chair in a day. That's before the ad network gets updated. What's hilarious is the ads are showing me the chair I bought (creepy yes) but that chair is no longer of interest to me for purchase. And it continues doing so for the next month or more. Almost all my purchases are done this way, as that allows for strong budgeting.

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The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Re:Isn't this a no brainer? by Grishnakh · 2015-10-13 02:29 · Score: 5, Insightful

I'm not trying to be a Google shill here, but this is exactly why I like Google's ads (or rather, liked, back when they were more obviously ads on the right side of the search results). If I'm looking for something, I might do a Google search for it; if one of the AdWords ads shows up, as a small text-only ad, and it's exactly the thing I'm looking for, that's a good thing IMO. I guess this is called "targeted advertising", and IMO it's the best kind. If I'm explicitly searching for something, or have some kind of problem I'm Googling for an answer to, having a small,text-only ad pop up with a product that solves my problem is a big help.
Re:Isn't this a no brainer? by myowntrueself · 2015-10-13 02:43 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's why I don't use ad blocking software or disable ads on Slashdot.
Imagine if, as you walk along a street in downtown the small shops, which depend on advertising (right?) have these little boards outside their shops with some advertising. Actually this is pretty normal in most places.
Now imagine you have to pay to walk down the street in downtown, a small fee which goes toward maintaining these advertising boards.
Now imagine if you accidentally touch one of these advertising boards theres a chance you'll get infected with the flu.
Now imagine instead of flu sometimes its zombie plague.
Thats what Internet advertising is like.

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In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Re:Isn't this a no brainer? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-13 03:10 · Score: 5, Insightful

The internet wasn't devised as a revenue generating platform, just because you usurped it so doesn't give you a right to my eyeballs nor to demand payola for your content. Don't like it, tough shit.
Re:Isn't this a no brainer? by JustAnotherOldGuy · 2015-10-13 04:09 · Score: 5, Funny

Yep, you'll be sitting in that chair for weeks or months while they're still trying to sell you one.
Personally I find it hilarious. I sometimes go to Amazon and browse the infant stuff (formula, highchairs, strollers, cribs, etc) and then sit back and watch as the ads for that stuff follows me around the web for a month or two. Lol, it must really confound their metrics and ad data. And I've never even bought a child! :)

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Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Re:Isn't this a no brainer? by jfengel · 2015-10-13 04:24 · Score: 4, Interesting

Most ads aren't aimed at getting you to click on them and make a purchase. The goal of an ad is to put a concept in your mind. The purest form of this are the political yard signs. Nobody thinks, "I saw 90 signs for Bob and 110 signs for Mike; therefore I will vote for Mike." But people do respond to pressures like that; it creates biases and impressions that they don't even realize.
Even when you do your research, you are influenced by these. Most of the time, your research is going to be inconclusive. There isn't any "best chair"; at best, it's a matter of personal taste. Most products, from canned peaches to computers, will end up having similar specifications, but you'll have a preference because you like the flavor of this brand or the you had a good experience with that computer in the past.
Advertising helps put those ideas in your head. Just seeing it in the ads will give you a positive feeling toward the brand, if the advertising is well done. A lot of advertising is poorly done, of course, but a well-done ad can influence preferences in very subtle ways. That subtlety means it's aggravatingly hard to tell which ads work and which ads won't, but advertising continues to exist for a reason: it steers consumer preferences during the phase where they don't know what they want and end up trusting their instincts. Which applies to more purchasing decisions than most people realize.
Stupid advertisers want ads that they measure working by clicks, so they optimize the ads to attract clicks, but that doesn't drive purchasing. The best ads are the ones that consumers don't even realize they've seen, but just develop a cumulative effect of exposure. That's hard to do, and requires a lot of time, money, and effort to get right. Even then it's a crapshoot, like trying to write a popular song. But in the end, there's a market for so many chairs and so many peaches and so many computers, and advertising can steer enough purchases towards yours and away from somebody else's equivalent one in a way that merely improving the specifications can't do.
Re:Isn't this a no brainer? by WCMI92 · 2015-10-13 06:44 · Score: 3, Informative

Most people wouldn't use ad blocking if the advertisers didn't allow malware laden ads be served to their PC's turning them into mindless drones for a botnet. They could fix that problem easily by turning around and vetting ads. Or if the ads weren't so obtrusive and annoying either. Bet we'll see within 3 months that they're reversing this stance, or within a year it shuts down.
Remember when the New York Times decided to put themselves behind a Paywall? That didn't last a year. I suspect the same thing will happen here. People don't like ads. The answer isn't to block adblockers, the answer is to stop annoying the shit out of your visitors that they would WANT an ad blocker!

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Corporatism != Free Market
Re:Isn't this a no brainer? by Kinematics · 2015-10-13 09:53 · Score: 3, Interesting

Car analogy time!
So, suppose you're driving your car. Every once in a while, a great big billboard pops up in between you and your passenger, interrupting your conversation. Other times, the radio turns on by itself, blaring out annoying music while someone was trying to give you directions on where to turn.
Meanwhile, each time this happens, it uses up a bit of gas. By the end of the month you realize you've spent twice as much on gas as you thought you should have, given how much you drove. And the car just doesn't go as fast as it used to when you first got it. You're lucky to hit 45 miles per hour on the freeway.
Plus, periodically, something strange will happen with your own or one of your neighbors' cars, where the car will just drive off by itself in the middle of the night, doing who-knows-what. And you have to hope your car is back and somewhat usable in the morning when you need to get to work. And hope that you don't find extra charges on your credit card for stuff you never bought.
But then you find out that all you have to do to stop all that is to stop handing over your car key to every random person in the street who asks for it. The people that you meet are a bit upset that they can't borrow your car's billboard, and gas, and stereo, and other such things, but in the end you find that you can drive in peace and quiet, with good gas mileage, get where you're going pretty quickly, and are less likely to get into an accident. But those people say that you're stealing from them. And somehow manage that without any sense of irony. (The analogy starts getting rather difficult to extend at this point; there's a limit to my car-analogy-fu.)

Ads are fine by dmgxmichael · 2015-10-13 01:40 · Score: 4, Insightful

Viruses not so much. Way too much of that going around to make it safe to browse without adblocking - too many ad carriers do not audit the ads that are displayed, leading to all sorts of click bait and virus crap being displayed.

Re:Ads are fine by AmiMoJo · 2015-10-13 02:22 · Score: 5, Informative

So I decided to give them a try and comply with their request. Disabled uBlock and visited the site. To be fair there don't seem to be animated or noisy ads on there. The page was pretty slow to load due to the ad servers taking several seconds to respond. The site itself seems be be a "tabloid" style paper (I don't read German), with some soft porn on the front page (scroll down a bit) and crappy looking content.
Then I tried to read an article, and it displayed the first few lines and then demand â0.99 for the rest. Fuck you Bild, I accepted your ads and shitty Javascript and you still want me to pay for your content? I already paid!

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const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Re:Ads are fine by yodleboy · 2015-10-13 03:52 · Score: 3, Insightful

Even without an ad blocker, if I'm to scared to click the ad because god only knows what will happen to my computer, then what's the point of having an ad? On the 1 in 1000 chance the ad is relevant, I'm more likely to just open another tab and go directly to the site. These guys have no one to blame but themselves. When the only thing you can offer people is an infection or an annoyance, why would you be surprised when people block you?

Like most internet things, media companies had a chance to get in front of this and condition people to pay for content at the outset. Instead they created overpriced paywalled gardens with minimal content, then watched as people went to ad-supported pay sites. Instead of lowering prices and offering a better product, they stopped charging and joined the race to the bottom.

The first domino has tipped by rmdingler · 2015-10-13 01:40 · Score: 4, Insightful

I've been seeing more requests than ever recently to "please turn off Adblocker" while browsing.

If a site is important enough to me, I'll pay a nominal fee rather than slow loading times with what is often intrusive hogwash.

If it's not, the information I seek is probably available elsewhere.

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Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

Ernest Hemingway

Re:The first domino has tipped by aaarrrgggh · 2015-10-13 02:05 · Score: 3, Insightful

For me, there are 4-5 news sites I visit regularly that all push for subscriptions. $5/month each starts to be obscene if it isn't your only go-to source for information.
Re:The first domino has tipped by serviscope_minor · 2015-10-13 02:13 · Score: 5, Interesting

I've been seeing more requests than ever recently to "please turn off Adblocker" while browsing.
Funnily enough, I see them too. I don't run an adblocker, though. I do however run noscript. I have no objection to ads in principle. However, I'm not running scripts unless I have a compelling reason to do so. So, if you want to show me ads, serve them up without Javascript.
If you want to hog my CPU and eat my battery... well, tough.

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SJW n. One who posts facts.

And nothing of value was lost by dunkelfalke · 2015-10-13 01:41 · Score: 3, Insightful

Bild is the worst example of German yellow press. I seriously doubt that people who are intelligent enough to install an ad blocker would read bild.de anyway.

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"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap

Neo's response to Agent Smith is in order by Morgaine · 2015-10-13 01:43 · Score: 3, Funny

It seems that the news industry believes we cannot do without them, and that we must pay for the privilege of keeping them in business.

It's quite hysterical. They're in for a big surprise.

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"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra

Fuck you by DogDude · 2015-10-13 01:49 · Score: 4, Informative

Dear publisher: Fuck you. I'm happy with either paying for journalism or viewing YOUR ads. I'm not going to allow your web site to shove somebody else's ads in my face. If you want to sell ads, then sell ads. Including some piece of code from an ad wholesaler isn't going to fly, in the same way I wouldn't accept an unknown package wrapped in brown paper from other random people trying to sell me shit along with my paper newspaper or paper magazine.

Sell your own ads, publishers. That's part of your job. If you can't be bothered to do that, then I can't be bothered to help you get paid.

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I don't respond to AC's.

Just tried it by ArsenneLupin · 2015-10-13 01:55 · Score: 3, Informative

Just tried it. I can still access it. No ads. Lots of yellow news. I use noscript.

(Btw, just accessed it for testing, out of curiosity, not for reading the yellow news...)

Dear Advertisers, by Scutter · 2015-10-13 01:58 · Score: 5, Interesting

Dear Advertisers,

We had a social contract. In exchange for our attention, you agreed to fund our entertainment. But you squandered that agreement and broke our contract. Simply getting our attention wasn't enough for you. In your zeal to make your ads stand out over the others, you started using insecure technologies that exposed your customers to attack. When you realized that your customers were commodities to be bought and sold, you tried to monetize us. You started using tracking cookies. You sold us to your friends and partners. You violated our trust. And now you're asking us to trust you again but you haven't done a single thing to earn that trust back. Quite the contrary, in fact, you continue to abuse us over and over.

Advertisers, you have asked us to return to the old model but have given us no reason to do so. I will continue to block your ads and your malignant tumors until you have proven without a shadow of a doubt that you have mended your ways. Until then, SCREW YOU.

Sincerely,
Your former customers

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"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"

Yes. It's An Epic Fail. by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-13 02:03 · Score: 3, Insightful

Their ad blocker banner requires JavaScript. Running NoScript circumvents it.

Need a new form of adblock by McFly777 · 2015-10-13 02:20 · Score: 3, Interesting

Perhaps what is needed is a new form of adblock, which actually loads the ads, possibly on a low priority basis*, but doesn't display them.

*Thinking along the lines of accept the first 1k of the ad, then go slow on the TCP responses, until the main-page/non-ad-identified bits have finished. I am looking for a system such that the ads are downloading to /dev/null while I am reading the ad-free page.

Of course the negative response to that will be to put some active content in the ad such that the article will not display until the ad "payload" is actively processed and phones home. Thus blurring the line between ads and malware even more than it is already. (at times)

(If someone is already doing this sort of thing, please don't flame me, just inform. Frankly, although I used to maintain block lists, etc., I gave up years ago. Well not completely; I do attempt to avoid certain publishers, but that is on a more manual basis rather than automated.)

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McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman

Re:What happens when the content isn't worth it? by bws111 · 2015-10-13 02:23 · Score: 4, Insightful

The same thing that happens in the real world: you do without the product, and the seller does without the revenue. Quite simple.

Re:Undetectable adblocker by gstoddart · 2015-10-13 02:27 · Score: 5, Insightful

To counter the malware aspect of ads, if you do nothing with the downloaded binary data then your chances of getting any sort of infection from it is effectively zero.

Except if I don't trust it, why the hell would I download it? Why would I waste bandwidth on crap I don't want or trust?

The ad sources have already demonstrated themselves to be shady and not trustworthy.

The average web site seems to think 20+ external sites all tracking what you do is OK. Sorry, but I am not here to support the business model of 20 tracking companies who have nothing to do with me.

I won't click on the ads, and I sure as hell will keep blocking the hell out of them. If a website shows me the thing to turn on cookies, or enable javascript, or tells me that I can't see their site with an adblocker ... I'll simply leave.

All those external entities on a website who want my data can fully expect that I will block them as much as I can.

It's absolutely mind-boggling the sheer amount of CRAP in the average web-page, and once you start running the blockers and seeing just how much there is, the idea of turning off those blockers seems idiotic.

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Lost at C:>. Found at C.

Time for User TOS? by ramriot · 2015-10-13 02:36 · Score: 3, Insightful

Ok so your site needs money from Ads to survive, I get it, we all have to make compromises. But you are serving those ads via un-vetted bloated 3rd party scripts which can harbor malware, cost me time and money & track my Ass between sites. Therefore if you put up a page that asks me to accept your 3rd party Scripted Ads, I will send you a copy of my User Terms of Service for you to agree too. In which you will find clauses that require you to accept responsibility for all 1st, 2nd & 3rd party content and resources served by your site and all losses incurred should that adversely affect my systems, privacy etc.

Alternatively, if you wish to serve all Ads in a 1st party context without scripting then I'm powerless to stop you and would be much happier.

So in the end to me its not the Ads themselves that are the problem, but how they are delivered and what hidden factors are present that I consider a detriment to my using your site.

Malware-blocking by simplypeachy · 2015-10-13 02:43 · Score: 5, Informative

Christ, nearly 6MB in 642 URL requests just to load their home page once. Anyhoo, from two full fetches of their home page. Excepting the dozens of trackers and advert organisations that I haven't noted to be involved in malware, we have:

smartclip.net: Party to LG "Smart TV" spying without consent.
turn.com: Repeated malware advertisments to-date. Most recently infecting iPhones.
ads.yahoo.com: Repeated malware advertisments to-date.
serving-sys.com: Repeated malware advertisments to-date.
advertising.com: Repeated malware advertisments to-date.
adnxs.com: Repeated malware advertisments to-date, including Angler Exploit Kit via MSN.com
adscale.de: Malware advertisements.
adsrvr.org: Malware adverts, pushing virus-infected toolbars
rubiconproject.com: Repeated malware bundlers, unwanted toolbars, search result injectors, home-page meddling
mathtag.com: Malware advertisements.
openx.net: Repeated malware advertisments to-date.
bidswitch.net: Malware advertising. Most recently infecting iPhones.

This isn't advert blocking. It's a crucial layer of system security.

When do ad networks get sued for spreading malware by WCMI92 · 2015-10-13 02:55 · Score: 3, Informative

Nope. If you want to block my adblocker, fine, I won't go there.

I find NO ad acceptable, but if web ads acted like newspaper ads and sat there, didn't try to distract me from reading, didn't take over my screen, didn't make noise, flash, throb, etc, I'd TOLERATE it.

These days, ad networks are so laden with malware and viruses (when is Google or another ad network going to get sued for not vetting content?) that an ad blocker is antivirus for your web browser!

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Corporatism != Free Market

Re:AdBlock+ = inferior & 'souled-out' vs. host by JustAnotherOldGuy · 2015-10-13 04:32 · Score: 3, Insightful

All you're doing is making sure that I NEVER EVER use APK.

NEVER.

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Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...

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German Publisher Axel Springer Bans Adblocking Users From Bild Website (axelspringer.de)

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