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

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the and-stay-out dept.

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."

2 of 442 comments (clear)

  1. I hate that I am using AdBlock by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I use AdBlock. I wish I didn't have to. I do not mind websites using advertising to finance them making quality content I want to read. As a former open source developer, I know it takes real money to make quality content -- "for fun and for free" is a fantasy pirates made up to justify downloading something they ought to pay for.

    For years, I could block annoying animated ads without resorting to adblock. First, I changed Netscape binaries to make the string “netscape2” “notscape2” so that animated gifs would not loop. Then, when I moved to Firefox, I used about:preferences to stop animated gifs from looping and used the flashblock plugin to block animated flash ads. But now, the annoying animated ads are using Javascript. Since NoScript has issues with blocking legitimate content, I have installed various forms of adblock (I have used adblock, adblock plus, and ublock)

    They work, but they by default blacklist all sites, which I don't like. Sites with non-intrusive ads should be rewarded with page views. Sites with intrusive ads should be punished with all ads blocked from their site. I end up whitelisting a site I haven't been to and reloading the page; I will un-whitelist them if there is a single animated ad on the page.

    The web is killing the publishing industry, and I do not agree with the notion that we are entitled to content without paying them, either directly or by looking at ads. But animated ads are just to distracting for me -- I can not read an article which has them -- and have no analog in print media, so I need to block them. I just wish I could do so by blocking only the animated ads.

  2. There is a reason by sectokia · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The ad companies have a new product which is basically they run your website instead of you, allowing the ads to come from the same domain as regular content, effectively making ad block ineffective, as it won't be able to distinguish between content and ads. They have no interest at all in letting ad block learn about this product. Ad block only go to the event to essentially extort money anyway, saying they will allow non intrusive ads, in reality you just pay them money and you get on their white list.