Adblock Plus Blocked From Attending Online Ad Industry's Big Annual Conference (arstechnica.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: Adblock Plus has been uninvited to the upcoming IAB Leadership Summit and is having its registration fee refunded. The company was informed of the cancellation in an email with little explanation. A company blog post reads in part: "Unfortunately, the top brass at the US IAB don't want us coming to their Leadership Summit next week in Palm Desert, California. We attended last year, and we signed up again for their 2016 meeting including paying the hefty entrance fee. We were fully confirmed and they even listed us on their website as a participant. Then this week we got one of those sudden emails that land in your inbox innocently, then floor you with something weird, unbelievable or ridiculous when you click on them. This one came from an unfamiliar IAB address, and it informed us that our registration for the summit was canceled and our fee refunded."

Comments

Firefox already has built-in ads.

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently used Firefox for the first time in ages (I've been using Chrome, like everyone else).

I quickly learned that Firefox now comes with built-in ads! I don't know what the technical name for the page is, but it's the one that's a grid of panels. Several of them were goddamn advertisements! They were totally irrelevant to my wants and needs, too.

I couldn't fucking believe it. How the fuck could somebody at Mozilla think it was a good idea to stick ads in the browser itself?! Holy fuck, Firefox became popular because it let users install ad-blocking extensions! Didn't Mozilla realize that?!

There's no point worrying about the ad industry or ad blockers when the web browser itself is forcing ads on you!

Fucking unbelievable, Mozilla! Fucking unbelievable!

Re:Firefox already has built-in ads.

[aitikin]

Have you been living under a rock? This has been discussed here and later removed by Mozilla. You can't blame them for trying to find a revenue stream not linked to a competing browser and the fact that they admitted its failure should be respected.

Re:malware block plus is what I want

[StevenMaurer]

This is what AdBlock plus is. They're not against advertising. They're against intrusive advertising. Websites can apply to get their non-intrusive ads whitelisted from the program, so that they show up anyway. (Note: the criteria being used is much akin to the way ads were displayed in newspapers and print magazines.) An overwhelming majority of AdBlock users who responded to their survey said that this was the way to go, because everyone knows the content needs to be paid for.

Perspective

[DrYak]

the content is free (no money payments) regardless, so your first argument doesn't particularly hold up.

The content is free (no mony payments) because you're (supposed to be) viewing ads. Take away that source of revenue, and the argument very much holds up.

It's a problem of perspective (again the BSD's freedom vs. GPL's freedom debate all over...)

For ME AS A USER/READ:
- I just click on a link, I don't pay, I get content, It's free (for me as a end-user, reader).
- If I don't use adblock : it's the same (from my point of view).
- If I do use adblock : it's also the same (minus all the flashing/blking/noisy/fullscreen annoyance)
- If I do use uBlock AND privacy badger : it's also the same (though my identity doesn't get stolen).
- If I do use uBlock AND privacy badger AND NoScript : it's still the same (though It's much harder to drive-by corrupt/infect my browser, at the cost of slightly broken UX)

No matter what, I still get my content simply with clicking, no payment required. It's free (as in beer. Gratis).

It's for the publisher that things change:
- if readers don't use anything : the publisher seemingly handed content for free, put actually get money back by selling the crap out of its users.
- if readers uses AdBlock / uBlock, etc: the publisher handed something out for free, and doesn't get much back, beyond some marketing analysis of readership, that can still be sold for money to sponsors
- if readers use uBlock, PrivacyBAdger, NoScript, Tor, etc. : publisher is screwed. They did hand content for free as usual, but this time they can't sell anything about the user to make some buck.

But from the users' point of view, nothing change the price paid for the content. It was 0$ before ad blocking, its still 0$ after.

So the argument that "suddenly the users discovers they can haz something for free" that was mentioned above is invalid.
They already got it for free (i.e.: gratis, without needing to pay any dollars) before.

What change is their experience of the web :
- before, it was an awful place with marketeer trying to push obnoxious ads as hard as possible. Making the result, distracting, ugly, noisy, not user friendly, slowing down loading time, and costing a fucking lot more on bandwidth. (actually costing more than what the publisher makes up, but that's another debate).
- after : web is finally a bit saner place, where you can actually get the content you want and nothing useless more.

You can have security vulnerabilities by visiting an ad-free page that uses JavaScript. Hell there are exploits in CSS.

That's why the more paranoid people don't stop at AdBlock/uBlock but keep other blocking of Javascript and plugins: NoScript or Flashgot, etc.