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

Old Habits Die Hard

[Random Nobody]

Every time some technology innovation comes along and smashes a business model the incumbents cry and drag their feet every step of the way. Adapt or die.

Re:Old Habits Die Hard

[ichthus]

This is, to a degree, like the record companies not wanting to talk to Napster or Apple (when iTunes was new), because their business model was being destroyed. ABP is not going away, and they've extended olive branches (in the way of allowing "non-intrusive" ads). Ignoring ABP is counter productive to the ad industry's cause. Work with them, or they will continue to work against you.

Re:Old Habits Die Hard

[Pezbian]

Online advertising wouldn't need to be destroyed if it wasn't focused on being as annoying as possible to grab attention.

Maybe companies should focus less on loud, bandwidth-hogging, un-mutable videos, pop-overs, pop-unders, anything Flash, and focus on making stuff people want to buy.

There are no commercials for Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Bentley. Beater dealerships, on the other hand...

Re:Old Habits Die Hard

[amicusNYCL]

What? So if my business is, say, making people unable to turn their TVs on, the people in the TV industry should just "adapt" to people being unable to use their product?

Well, yeah, assuming of course that for some reason an increasing majority of users have decided to use the product that blocks TVs (fantastic analogy, BTW). This is what is happening in online advertising: users have decided they are better off without it. Of course, that is their choice to make. If that means they can't access forbes.com, then people will keep things like that in mind.

Adblock plus is literally in the process of destroying the business of online advertising.

Don't be obtuse. The coffin of online advertising was designed, perfected, and manufactured by the advertisers. They made their bed, now they have to lie in it. Use of tools like Adblock is the inevitable conclusion to the abuses and overreach that online advertisers have been doing for the past couple decades. You might as well whine about popup blockers or spam filters. Once a technology like that gets abused, you can bet your ass that another technology is going to be developed to block it. If advertisers don't like that then they probably should have started their self-policing campaign before ad blockers really caught on. As it is, they're starting to realize that their tricks are going to be caught, and only now are they crying foul. They did this to themselves, if the attendees of the IAB's conference want to blame someone for the state of their industry and their business model all they have to do is look around the room. The most surprising part of this whole affair to me is that it took so long for ad blockers to become mainstream, but I'll chalk that up to the fact that IE did not have an ad blocker for so long. The rise of browsers supporting extensions has opened up the general public to ad blockers. Adblock Plus was released in 2006. Advertisers have had a decade to understand that people don't want to see ads and think about how they can co-exist peacefully, but instead they used that decade to figure out how to force more and more ads down peoples' throats. They made that decision, so now they get to deal with the consequences. I don't think you're going to see a lot of people shedding a tear for advertisers.

why would a group of advertisers want to have anything to do with them?

You would think advertisers would want to hear from the other side, particularly on ways they can come to a compromise. Apparently, you would be wrong.

Re:Old Habits Die Hard

[sl3xd]

So if my business is, say, making people unable to turn their TVs on, the people in the TV industry should just "adapt" to people being unable to use their product?

Don't talk crap. Adblock doesn't prevent people from using their web browsers.

A closer descrition: "If somebody is making a technology that prevents TV's from showing advertising, the TV industry should adapt to people not watching ads."

Well, let's look at the situation: We've had DVR's that can skip commercial for nearly a generation now.

Some of the more forward-looking companies in the TV industry has adapted to a model that has no ads: See Netflix, Amazon Prime video, and Hulu +'s ad-free option.

Each of those networks produce their own highly-rated, highly-watched content.

There are, of course, incumbents who refuse to adapt.

Ironically, the ones who refuse to adapt are all advertising companies: the old TV and cable networks. Their refusal to adapt is well described in their anger/frustration that Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon do not report their viewerships (ie. "ratings").

Well, let's think about that for a second: What are ratings for? They're to provide a value for how much an advertising slot during the show should cost.

Well... Netflix doesn't show ads, so what is the point of ratings? Netflix knows how many people are watching, and they know what it costs to stream. As long as they've got a profit, and their customers are happy, why do they care what advertisers think?

It's the advertisers trying refusing to change their habits, and refusing to accept that consumers are so tired of advertising that consumers prefer to pay directly for content than get it "free" with commercials.

In the same way, internet consumers are sick of being monitored and assaulted all of the time by intrusive advertisers who continue to try to force increasingly unpalatable advertising upon consumers.

Re:Old Habits Die Hard

[ceoyoyo]

I doubt you'd be welcome at an ad industry conference with that attitude either. You're suggesting companies concentrate on engineering and customer service instead of marketing? Madness!

Re: Old Habits Die Hard

[ZeroWaiteState]

Then people would stop using Firefox like they stopped using IE. People use Firefox because it can be made to obey the wishes of users. A browser which doesn't obey isn't as useful as one that does. Would you buy a car that slammed on the brakes automatically at every billboard? Would you even agree to ride in one for free?

Re:Old Habits Die Hard

[Chas]

No, Adblock Plus is in the business of formulating acceptable standards for web advertising.

Right now what we've got is a mixture of Wild Wild West on crack and a whorehouse specializing in HIV positive girls where the nearest condom is several continents away.

Don't get me wrong. I support content providers' right to make money off of their content by utilizing a portion of my screen real estate and attention.

That, however, doesn't give them the right to completely take over the entirety of my screen real estate and pop un-avoidable video ads with full, loud audio.

Additionally, ad networks are an unmitigated clusterfuck of an attack vector on my machine. My generosity doesn't extend to having to burn multiple hours/days restoring a system because some rogue ad/network slid malware by my AV/AM systems and crashed my system. My time and effort is worth money too.

And come on. The Forbes Fuckup only happened.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... about 2 weeks ago.

"Disable your ad blocker SO WE CAN SHOVEL MALWARE ON YOU!"

FUCK

THAT

NOISE!

The reason internet advertising is in such dire straights is the advertisers PUSHED it to this juncture. They kept coming up with ever more obnoxious, intrusive, downright DANGEROUS methods of serving us shit we really don't want to see. As such, people who want to actually be able to use their computers in a safe, effective manner, look towards blockers. So these ad assholes keep looking for ways AROUND ad blockers, coming up with things that are even more crazy-obnoxious, intrusive and dangerous. Hell, if they could, they'd force click-throughs too.

And what remediation do people get when malvertising kills their machine?

It's a bunch of buck-passing.

Site Owner: Oh it was the ad network! Fuck you! Have a nice day!
Ad Network Owner: Oh it was a rogue advertiser! Fuck you! Have a nice day!
Advertiser; Oh! It was a third party company we hired to get our name out there! Fuck you! Have a nice day!
Third Party Ad Company: *CHIRP* *CHIRP* (Basically, they're operating under another in a series of new names this week. Again. Fuck you! Have a nice day!)

As such, there is ZERO accountability in this "industry". It's ALL snake oil.

Basically, the internet advertising people don't want to settle on an acceptable ad standard.
Know why?
Because the profit margins are even shittier than those for their current obnoxious, dangerous crap!

This bit of shenanigans with ABP is just another nail the internet ad companies are driving into their own coffins.

Internet advertising is a nasty, STD'ed up whore. Ad blockers are condoms.

IAB

[phantomfive]

IAB represents the advertisers, so it's not surprising they're upset at adblock. Ad blocking has just been going up and up.

Re:IAB

[gstoddart]

Sure, but you'd think they'd at least be willing to listen to WHY they've pissed people off so badly to the point more people are using this stuff.

I mean, you can choose to not be aware of the fact that you serve malware and compromise people's computers like some self entitled ass ... or you can try to figure out WTF you're doing wrong.

In this case, it sounds like a bunch of clueless idiots not being willing to understand why people are now actively taking steps to block them.

AdBlock isn't "the enemy".

Terrible ad practices and non-existent accountability for delivering malware is. Bad management of our personally identifying data is. Not understanding we no longer wish to be tracked by 20 entities on every web site we visit is.

The IAB feels entitled to this stuff. Which means the rest of us will, without any remorse, actively deny it to them.

I don't owe brightcove or scorecard research a damned thing, and I never will. The sooner they stop acting like spoiled children the more they might understand the mess they're in.

Re:IAB

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is/was their opportunity to work with Adblock (as the representative/proxy for the people who block the ads) to figure out a way to make ads acceptable to people so they don't want/need to block them.

Like a lot of people, I'm not against tasteful advertising. I will stop blocking when it comes [back]. But block the content I navigated to see, shove auto-playing audio and video down my throat, and create just generally annoying ads with lots of flashing, etc., and yes, I am going to block your ads.

So adapt, or fuck off and die.

Re:IAB

[MightyMartian]

It's a gathering of evil sociopaths. They don't care about why people don't like what they produce. We should be happy these monsters are in advertising, because otherwise they'd probably be driving around in vans kidnapping people, torturing and murdering them, and then eating the remains in cannibalistic orgies. These are evil people.

Who likes Ads?

[no-body]

Aren't they a permanent annoyance?

One goes to a site for a certain purpose - to look/find/do something.
Then there are movements, popups, slideshows aside from the permanent - please give feedback/survey later-ones...
Visual beggars for attention, distractions, from the original purpose requiring extra effort and time to avoid/ignore/eliminate.

Who likes/needs those?

Suckers! On a very large part of the Internet, defying the original purpose of this great idea.

Born to be killed.

Re:I hate that I am using AdBlock

[clampolo]

They have forced us to do it. 1) There are some web pages where you can hear your computer's fans start to scream because there is so much javascript crap that starts running. 2) Some pages take an eternity to load up because of the megabytes of ads that need to be downloaded It's a lot easier to just block everything.

Re:What was the subject line in the email?

[amicusNYCL]

APK hasn't been spamming Slashdot lately, there's no reason to make fun of him at this point. If he has decided to stop posting his advertisements here then do your part and leave him alone. If he wants to make meaningful comments like other Slashdot users (stop laughing) then that's fine, let him. No reason to poke him if he's not spamming.

Re:What was the subject line in the email?

[Anonymous Coward]

>, due to his aggressive attitude towards, um, grammar, formatting, communications, and sanity.

FTFY

Re:Congratulations, guys!

[mujadaddy]

who's going to generate revenue for the companies behind these websites?

how do you propose reddit generate revenue? all those aggregator sites?

Revenue isn't a fundamental right. The network was better when it was all hobbyists & researchers.