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AdBlock Plus Updates Acceptable Ads Policy
AmiMoJo writes: By default the popular AdBlock Plus plug-in allows some "acceptable" ads to be displayed. A blog post announcing updates to policy describes the goals of the update: easier to understand, more robust and more explicit about what is and isn't acceptable. The new criteria are listed on another page, and the option to disable acceptable ads remains.
Complete list:
End of list.
Sorry, dear advertisers. You poisoned the well. Now please get lost.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sites deserve to be able to show ads and make revenue on their content.
They do deserve "to be able", and they are "able". What they don't deserve is the ability to force a person's computer to display an ad. ,It is misleading to sponsors to show ads to people who don't want to see ads, and who refuse to ever click on ads. This would be no more than wasting bandwidth and (where an amount is charged per impression rather than per click) is a dishonest collection of revenue.
I make a point to never click on ads, my brain tunes out ads, and where any ad gets through an ad blocker I make a note to avoid that product. I try my best to give misleading information where requested by any form used for marketing purposes. It would be less helpful for me to request ads than to block them.
If you're not paying a site for the service or contributing content, and are not allowing any ads, you're freeloading on their dollar.
And if they don't like it they can detect that, and they can fade into obscurity when people stop going there. It's a viable model for some sites though, if they have what people want and are willing to pay for. Most sites don't actually have any content which is that compelling, so they can quit their whining. 95% of the sites on the web could go away tomorrow and it would be a better place.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Alright, calm down Captain Righteous. Is anyone forcing you to use Adblock over something else?
There are not any ads that are acceptable. That's it. End of story.
Oh, so you're the arbiter of universal objective truth? Because I have some questions...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Then:
Users: hey can you give us less intrusive and annoying ads
Advertisers: screw you here is your ad
Now:
Advertisers: hey please don't block our ads thanks
Users: screw you
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Ads are the reason why a lot of good content can stay afloat on the web
Where is this "good content"? I can't find it and, frankly speaking, would have no problem if all ad-sponsored business would disappear from the web tomorrow, including this site.
Ads are the reason why a lot of good content can stay afloat on the web without asking for money directly,
You might be surprised to learn that there was an internet for several decades before the advertisers showed up, and that it had a dramatically higher signal to noise ratio then. I know, because I was there.
I'll take that internet over the one we have now, any day. If the advertisers go away again, that will be a good thing. The actual useful content will remain: things like wikipedia that I and others will voluntarily contribute to support. But your average click-bait idiot trap pages, they can die and the world will be better off for it.
force feed me their ads down my throat
You mean, like the awful "Slashdot Top Deals" ad that comes up a second after the page is loaded, bringing down the menu on the right and getting me to mistakenly click on it?
It's been years since I've been first offered that "Disable advertising" checkbox (since I'm an amazing contributor) and I have never used it, but with this new Slashdot Deals ad I might do it soon.
lucm, indeed.
I run a website that uses ads. It's called The Geek Pub. I make things and I create videos and articles so that others can do it themselves too.
I also sell detailed plan files on the site for anywhere between $1 and $10 depending on how complicated the project is. This is how I would LIKE to make my revenue. But it doesn't work. I have no choice but to show ads. Why? Because I almost daily find a copy of every plan my site sells on bittorrent or file sharing sites. I've even had people post links to them in the comment section of my own site!
The TRUTH: People want everything for free and they have zero desire to actually support the content creators. They steal our content and post it for the world and then complain about the ads we use to make money. We can't win as content creators.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Speak for yourself. Ads are the reason why a lot of good content can stay afloat on the web without asking for money directly, I get that.
I get it too, when I think about it rationally. The trouble is, I've been so bombarded with ads since I was born (and I'm not that young), be it on newspapers, roadside signs, television, the internet when it started to become commercially attractive... that I have a visceral hate of it, whatever product it plugs and whomever forces it onto me. I find any and all adverts vulgar, disgusting and a gross intrusion on my right to choose what I want to stuff my brain with.
As a result, I too block all ads on the internet. Yes, I know many sites couldn't live without it, but... well, if they can't, I'd rather they disappeared than have to look at ads.
Also, when I can't block, skip or hide ads, I *remember* what product was advertised, and by whom, and I make a mental note never to buy that product, and if possible, any other product from that company. That's what decades of wanton advertising has done to me. Talk about well poisoning...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Not to mention all the tracking and JavaScript bullshit. The web sucks now, and tools like ABP, privacy badger and HTTPS everywhere are becoming an absolute necessity.
An acceptable ad comes from the same domain as to web page. Simple as that.
I don't respond to AC's.
Or just buy some freakin ram you derp. What, are you on 4gb in 2015?
That may be true of desktops. But good luck fitting 8 GB into a compact laptop or a convertible laptop/tablet. A lot of such devices can use only the RAM soldered onto the board, and even those that do take SODIMMs likely have a chipset that limits the maximum module capacity.
Not only that, but ads should not take up more than 10% of the page. As it is most places ( if someone is unfortunate enough to not have adblock ) the CONTENT takes up 10% of the page with 90% being ads.
Same with youtube, first time in years I tried it without adblock was recently. Every. Single. Video. Was prefaced by a 15+ second ad that was un-skippable. Nope, back to adblock plus / ublock origin, not going to put up with that shit.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
You're just mentally devaluing it to say it wasn't good enough to be worth paying for, thus they didn't lose anything when you took it for free. It's a perfect rationalization of ad blocking and piracy for cheapskates and the poor, because you wouldn't/couldn't pay for anything it's okay if you download everything.
Actually, I think you're skipping a few ste" -- in particular, a site should agree to pay me damages if I get malware from one of theirps here. Ad blocking is actually slightly different from piracy.
I'm not applying for sainthood either, but if we want to have an intellectual discussion let's at least be honest about it.
Okay, let's be honest about it. There's a difference between selling a product like a movie or music or whatever and asking people to pay for it vs. putting something up on a publicly accessible website and demanding people also download annoying time-wasting ads from third-party sites that eat your bandwidth and your processor time.
Putting something on a publicly accessible internet page is like putting something on a public bulletin board in the middle of Times Square. If you want to claim "ownership" over it and don't want people to read it, don't post it in a publicly viewable space. There are plenty of sites that recognize common ad blockers and either display a message like "Please view our ads" or even refuse to show content unilaterally. I have no problem with that. I have no problem with paywalls, either, and I do subscribe to a few online services whose content I actually find valuable enough to pay for.
The problem with most sites and ads is that by viewing a site, I'm required to submit to a crapload of 3rd-party scripts and cookies loading on my machine. Many websites don't do their due diligence in checking out this stuff, so you're asking me to potentially infect my computer with malware in order to view the content? Sorry -- that price is too high.
If you had a site that guaranteed no 3rd-party trackers and only served ads from its own server that it had done due diligence in checking for malware, etc., THEN I might consider viewing the ads. But 99.9% of sites don't do anything like that, and thus I can't take the risk.
You can't run your business another way? That's not my problem. You don't want people to "take your stuff for free"? Put it behind a paywall, or at least set up a rudimentary screening thing for people browsing with common ad blockers that says, "We see you're using an ad blocker. You need to accept ads to view the rest of our site. Sorry." And then I'll make a decision about whether it's worth it to view your site.
But if you deliberately post your content on a publicly viewable website, I have no moral obligation to pay to download, render, and then waste my time sitting through your potentially malware-ridden ads from 3rd parties. Those are my "terms and conditions of use" for my computer. You don't like it? Don't put publicly viewable stuff on your website.
All of this is VERY different from piracy, which involves taking something which is generally sold for a price and sharing/downloading for free against the creator's wishes. The creator on a public website is implicitly allowing me to download content AND use an ad blocker, unless they tell not to.
If you go down the road to your logic, the next thing you'll be telling me is that it's immoral to get up and make a sandwich which muting my TV during a commercial. No, sorry -- that's not stealing content, and nor is viewing content on a public website.
(And by the way, I'm fully behind AdBlock trying to make standards for more reasonable ad practices, but it would have to go a lot further for me to find them "acceptable.")
That just means more sites should be asking for money directly. I don't mind paying for content at all and I do donate/support/subscribe the few sites I care about.
Say sites suddenly switch from taking ads to "asking for money directly." Then you go to your favorite search engine and you see a credit card number field instead of a query field. OK, so you put in your credit card number, pay $20 for a year's subscription, and then do your search. Then every site in the results wants a separate $20 per year subscription because it costs the merchant 35 cents plus 3.5% for a credit card transaction. Micropayments still haven't been figured out.
Essentially but refusing to pay, we are saying it is worth $0.
You may utter those words, but that is not what your actions are saying.
If you refuse to pay for a movie and never watch it, you are saying it is worth $0 to you.
If you refuse to pay for a movie and still watch it, you are saying it is worth whatever you consider your free time to be worth to you. You only have a limited number of hours of leisure time in your lifetime, and that has value. You just refuse to pay someone for content you obviously think has value. You can argue semantics on whether that is piracy, theft, etc. but it is certainly being an ass.
If you pay for a movie and watch it, you are saying it is worth the purchased price plus your free time.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
If you refuse to pay for a movie and still watch it, you are saying it is worth whatever you consider your free time to be worth to you. You only have a limited number of hours of leisure time in your lifetime, and that has value. You just refuse to pay someone for content you obviously think has value.
You almost have it, but you miss the bar a bit. Using an adblocker isn't refusing to pay someone, it's refusing to pay their asking price - which is viewing arbitrary ads. You're still expending your free time, you're expending your attention selectively to their content over other content. Maybe you're willing to make a donation? Who knows. That's why platforms like patreon (with all their flaws) exist. You can put content up and have people who appreciate it pay for it, rather than just put randomized ads up. Having a lower willingness to pay doesn't equate to piracy. That's how the free market works. Consumers have the power to drive down price by their actions.