Slashdot Mirror
Adblock Plus Maker Seeks Deal With Ad Industry Players (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader writes with Yahoo's report that the makers of Adblock Plus are "looking to reach out to advertisers and identify an 'acceptable' level and form of advertising on the net." That involves convincing advertisers to conform to the company's own guidelines for advertising, or an alternative path much disliked by some of the software's users — to pay the company to ignore ads that don't meet those guidelines. From the article:
Big websites can pay a fee not to be blocked. And it is these proceeds that finance the Cologne-based company and its 49-strong workforce. While Google and Amazon have paid up, others refuse.
Axel Springer, which publishers Germany's best-selling daily Bild, accuses [Adblock Plus maker] Eyeo of racketeering.
"We believe Eyeo's business model is against the law," a spokesman for Springer told AFP.
"Clearly, Eyeo's primary aim is to get its hands on a share of the advertising revenues."
Ultimately, such practices posed a threat to the professional journalism on the web, he suggested, an argument Eyeo rejects.
While I see Adblock's behaviour as *very* problematic (it's in the category "deregulated regulation", where a private entity, by its position takes the job of a regulator -- sometimes even encouraged by a state entity), without the supervision by democratic entities. Slippery and that (lots of examples come to mind, like a private entity in UK deciding that the image of a record cover is too obscene for Wikipedia, remember?)...
seeing Springer talk about "professional journalism" gives me the eeries too.
I choose to not side with any of them.
I'm amazed at each passing year how bad advertising gets on the internet. I doubt I click on more than 3 ads a year with content or a service that actually interests me. With the array of annoyances advertisers put into their arsenal over the last few years it's no wonder users are rejecting this experience. People on the internet come here for information and the exchange of ideas. We're accustomed to rapid fire, text based experiences. Content that produces annoying animations, loud sounds, or obfuscates content with a forced click to close something is not just annoying, it reduces the usability of the internet. I can remember when a website with a banner was considered to be a sellout. Just off the top of my head I can think of the vast array of websites I visit that are no longer usable without adblock: cnn.com (background), potterybarn.com (annoying hover ads), pier1.com (also annoying hover ads), youtube.com (every other video is now a 2 minute ad) .....
Is it any wonder with experiences like these we want to use this?
I have a no-no sticker on my letterbox that prevents unadressed paper advertisments. Running adblock is like having a no-no sticker.
Adblock is now looking for a middle ground. Instead of having a no-no sticker you can have an adblock-sticker that says: some unaddressed advertisment is allowed (ie. the ones allowed by adblock). If you translate this to the paper world it could mean only ads printed on recycled paper, only single page ads; not a whole booklet, ads that are clear and concise etc.
I don't mind supporting websites I like, but I absolutely hate advertisments that take over the page, 'steal' my attention or look like content. It's a fine line and as it stands the consumer is pretty powerless to find a good middle ground. Website owners are also pretty powerless because they don't have enough control over the ads that appear on their site. It's also difficult for ad makers because there are no guidelines. Only an entity like adblock has the power to force advertisers to behave: ie. behave or be blocked.
I don't quite understand the argument of people who don't want adblock to move in this direction. If you don't like it, switch to one of the many other adblocking plugins. Im sure there will always be one adblocker-like plugin that will aim to block all ads.
I see this as a healthy development, one that could finally rid us of annoying ads while making sure content providers get compensated.
I could also see a system where adblock works with ad providers to distribute revenue. For instance, you could chose to pay adblock (or some other entity) a monthly fee that gets distributed over the content providers that you consume. Kind like Flattr or YoutubeRed, but a system that could work on any platform, from any vendor.
Once upon a time ads annoyed me, I chose Adblock PLus because it got rid of the annoying ads.
Adblock Plus stopped doing a great job at blocking annoying ads and has then been uninstalled and everyone moved on...
Adblock Plus now wants to make it's inferior product worse to make a buck.
*looks at Ublock Origin icon and laughs*
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
That's some nice advertising you've got there... It'd be a shame if someone decided to block it...
But seriously, okay... you pay off ABP. A large group of users migrate to another ad-block tool... that tool's creator demands protection money... and so on. That, to me, is why it sounds so scummy -- because ABP can only promise not to block for it's own user-base. It's literally, "hey, give us a cut of your ad-revenue or we'll give a free app to people to prevent you from serving ads."
Does this policy undermine their "acceptable ads" option? i.e. ads are now acceptable if they meet a certain technical criteria or the provider has paid protection money?
Hahaha.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
I think most people are okay with ads. The shit that assaults your computer isn't advertising. I've been using adblock for a while now. So long that when I recently did a fresh install of Linux on an old laptop I picked up I forgot to set up adblock on Firefox. I was stunned at how aggressive ads are now. Unbelievable.
Most of what I said in another thread:
Ads are something no user wants, but every advertiser and content-hoster wants. Bottom line is ads will always be around in one form or another. And they will always be evolving and changing.
You can't get rid of them (permanently everywhere that is), and you do want some content to survive (e.g. Slashdot), so maybe an ad vetting/voting/whitelisting system has some merit.
Regarding ad voting, the potential for abuse of this is high (i.e. people hating every ad). One solution would be that your votes are always relative. In other words, do you like this ad more or less than other ads. This way some ads will always bubble to the top. And advertisers can then study/learn from those ads, and/or choose to run those ads more. And when they do that, people grow tired of those ads. So they bubble down the list and force new ads to appear.
This may not sound that great, but right now I am staring at sites that pad with screen after screen of white space, or force gigantic menus to overwrite content or display zero content when I try to ad-block them (via no JS and hosts anyway). Point is that we are already in the middle of an arms race.
People's browsers could be set for what they will allow through -- Javascript, or ad size, etc. Advertisers could pay according to how high up the ad rankings they want their ad to run -- "Top 10%", "Everyone". To reach everyone, your ad would cost more, and tend to be the best behaved.
I come here for the love
Racketeering is good semantics for their current business model indeed, as there is no supervision whatsoever right now. Like Bild (end everybody else) I also don't think Eyeo is doing this in a "transparent enough" way that there's no doubt they aren't enforcing an "advertising fee" in their "controlled space of the web" (i.e. everyone who uses their adblock, their only de facto product). It should be clear enough for users of adblock, and for "payers" of whitelisting what this money is for, and a clear description of what "work" it entails to whitelist some ad (and/or an entire website/domain).
If it is to be done right, Eyeo needs to disclose publicly it offers two products: AdBlock - a free piece of software that has no direct form of revenue; and "Verified Whitelisting", a service that consists solely on periodic validation of conformity (with their "sensible ads" paradigm) for each company that so requests.
Eyeo then needs to bill each company transparently for the actual work hours taken to verify the requested pages (including hours wasted in scenarios that involve telling the company some site does not conform due to reason XYZ). But most importantly, these billed hours need to be made public. Only through transparency can companies AND users be assured that Eyeo is doing what it publicizes it does (only validate "sensible ads", and not any ads by highly-profitable payers). This way, the practice starts entering legal ground. It's pretty much a process like legalizing weed - the state can be sure there's no trafficking because all business go through their supervision, but mostly just the fact it is due to go through state supervision is enough to stop abuse. Give supervision power to every user of adblock, and Eyeo is sure to do most of its business in the way they publicize, without actually making more money than they should be doing for such an easy job.
And most important of all - AdBlock development costs cannot overlap with the whitelisting paradigm costs. This final detail is what separates racketeering from the legal practice of creating this "sensible ads" paradigm and its validation process.
Disclaimer: this is my opinion. I am no Law expert, but to me - as a citizen and user of adblock - this is what makes me comfortable. I will stop using adblock as soon as I see abuse in this whitelisting process in clear form. But I am not a company paying for whitelisting, so I don't get their side of the picture as well as I should.
I'm generally fine with high level tracking that can't easily be tied to an actual person.
That said, there's no way to really audit how the dots are being connected, what's being stored, and with whom, so _practically_ speaking, I agree you pretty much do have to ban tracking in general.
All of that sounds reasonable and feasible, except for the "No Tracking" bit. The moment a 3rd party ad is rendered they have some information about you. At the very least, this is the URL of the site you're visiting, which may sound harmless enough, but it also usually carries information about your search terms (i.e. in Google) or your shopping habits (i.e. categories you're browsing on Amazon). And in the case of large ad networks which serve ads on most sites that you visit - well, they get a pretty detailed picture of what you do online.
So I'm all for the idea of less invasive ads, but if you want to ensure privacy and security you can only really get that by blocking indiscriminately.
Maybe a generation change will fix this.
I worked at an ad agency at the dawn of the commercial Internet. The people on the advertising side of the business had all kinds of problems adapting.
The print people wanted it to be another print medium and were frustrated by their lack of layout control and font selection. Their tool was giant images with click regions because they could basically export an Illustrator file as a graphic, so you'd end up with sites that were just a giant collection of images with click regions that led you to more images with more click regions.
The TV people treated it like another TV set, at first with just inserted videos, next with semi-interactive Flash animations that still had all the intelligence of a one-way TV commercial.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant future the people who didn't grow up on standard, commercial television or tweaking print layouts down to the pixel AND who came of age frustrated by overlays, popups, interstitials and understand ad blocking will become ascendant and stop imposing old thinking on the web.
You basically eliminated everything.
- No Tracking (Can't be done otherwise you would get the same ad repeatedly, and is necessary for context-awareness)
- No Animation (Can be done, but I think you meant "no VIDEO" ads on non-video content)
- No Sound (It violates every legitimate ad network to do this already)
- No Javascript (Impossible, otherwise you will see the ads burned into the content of the website, which is actually worse, because it's hard to be context-aware this way, do you really want to see ads for condoms on childrens comics?)
- No Plugins (Already being done)
- No third party hosts (Can't be done unless every site direct-sells the ads, which like above with the No Tracking and No Javascript, harms the user experience more than it improves it. Nobody buys directly from content publishers because campaigns have set dates to run, and it's faster for them to buy from an ad exchange and specify the conditions for the ad to be shown. Also many publishers have set it and forget it ad invocation code, so they don't want to manage the ads because it takes time away from producing content.)
- No delays (Only bad ad networks are slow, unfortunately you sometimes have to chain up to 10 ad networks to get a paying ad, and that is why some sites have slow ads, because the highest paying ad network has no inventory, so it goes to the next, with Google usually being at the end because Google adsense is not worth using if there is anything else.)
- No Adult content (You do realize that adult content ads only appear on sites that have approved it right? It's otherwise a violation of the ad networks terms and conditions to have ads on adult sites, and only adult sites run garbage ad networks that show adult ads.)
- No obfuscated links (The entire reason that happens is because of generic ad blocking.)
- No more than 10% of the page area (That is the publisher's fault, many newspaper sites dilute the value of their advertisements by having more than 3 ad units)
- No mixing ads and content (It violates ad networks rules to "not have ads clearly look like ads", and in fact the only sites that suffer from this are sites that offer downloads of something to begin with.)
- No Overlays (These are annoying and you'd think that "pop-ups" from the X-10 era would have been a lesson in not doing this)
- No interstitials (These are really only meant for linear content, eg you visit a site, and on the third page or so, you see this ad. It's not meant to be the first thing you see because it sends the user away from the publisher.)
Adblock is pretty much a garbage plugin, everyone knows how to defeat it easily and make users turn it off , and that's by using it's own ad blocking rules against it. Put the entire content in a css container called "ad" and you'll be forced to turn off ad block to view the site.