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Why Stack Overflow Doesn't Care About Ad Blockers
Press2ToContinue writes: Forging a bold step in the right direction, Stack Overflow announced today that they don't care if you use an ad blocker when you visit their site. "The truth is: we don't care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow. More accurately: we hope that they won't, but we understand that some people just don't like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn't like them, and they won't click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won't click on them harms campaign performance. ... Publishers can't win by forcing ads — especially low-quality ads — in people's faces. Think scantily-clad women selling flight deals, weight-loss supplement promos or wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube-men promoting car dealerships."
It's possible that this declaration by SO might help to clarify to advertisers that it is the overabundance of low quality ads that practically force the public to seek out ad blockers. But seriously, what is the likelihood of that?
Write your ads in a language not quite so notorious as an infection vector.
Good start, though.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It's ads that pop up and interrupt the browsing experience.
It's ads that masquerade as "facebook notifications" on your phone.
It's ads that start playing a video at fucking maximum volume while you are trying to work.
But most importantly, its ads that are made entirely out of javascript running on MY computer by another entity who has not been vetted or trusted by me. You do not need to run a program on my computer to sell me something.
It's the ads that are for all intents and purposes, malware. Adblocking+Noscript is the most effective antivirus. Accessing the internet without them is negligence. This is what stackoverflow and other sites need to start saying.
Does the "AD" icon in the story banner mean this story is an ad? That seems like an unprecedented level of honesty for Slashdot!
I think the whole advertising situation will get better once the tech bubble bursts. Just look at many of the tech companies now - they are giant advertising platforms, but spend most of their revenues and investor money on user acquisition through advertising. This is like a giant ponzi scheme really.
Google worked, and will probably keep working for some time now, because one of the main use cases for search is to find stuff you want to buy. When you go to the site and start searching for a particular product, it isn't a big deal (and sometimes is useful) when ads come up for that product or equivalents you might not have heard off. The advertising has actual value in informing you about what is available. Other sites, such as Facebook, might have more information on me, but I go there to look at pictures of my friend's dogs and kids, not when I want to find something to buy. For that reason I find their ads incredibly annoying, and despite Zuckerberg going on about how they make them relevant, he would only be true if I was some kind of consumption machine that wonders around the internet like a virtual godzilla eating up every product that is shoved in my face.
My prediction is that eventually the industry will fall apart as companies realise the ponzi nature of current advertising prices, and that much of this expenditure is not converting in to sales. In that regard, the better tracking/conversion tools that the internet allows may be the industries own downfall.
Personally I would never click ads, but even if I wanted to, the possibility of potential malware or other nefarious deeds would still stop me from clicking it.
If you're complaining about me not watching ads on your site, how about showing me ads FROM your site, not a third party's; and static images and text, no video, no animation, no scripts, no multipage GIFs. Certainly never popups/unders/etc. I do NOT object to static images and text, for which I'm already paying the bandwidth to download.
I'd rather they stopped cluttering up search results and disappeared.
I know it! Geeze, I just had a problem this morning and when I searched for a solution, all these Stackoverflow hits showed up with posts by people solving my problem.
The nerve of these people! BTW, their SEO optimization company is just brilliant!
I think the whole advertising situation will get better once the tech bubble bursts.
You seem curiously convinced that A) we are in a bubble and B) that advertising will go away or "get better". You can't really know A for certain by definition because bubbles generally can only be identified in retrospect and B will never ever happen. It's unclear what "get better" means to you but I'm pretty sure whatever it is won't happen.
My prediction is that eventually the industry will fall apart as companies realise the ponzi nature of current advertising prices, and that much of this expenditure is not converting in to sales.
I think you don't understand the advertising business. You think that companies are naively throwing money at advertising because they don't know any better. While there are some out there where that is true for the most part buyers of advertising understand very well the relationship between advertising dollars spent and the returns they get. It's not at all hard to get a pretty solid idea of the correlation between ad spend and revenue.
...Our belief is that if someone doesn't like them, and they won't click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won't click on them harms campaign performance. ... Publishers can't win by forcing ads — especially low-quality ads — in people's faces. ...
FTA on SD : "it is the overabundance of low quality ads that practically force the public to seek out ad blockers"
IMO it is missing the point : intrusiveness is the problem. Overabundance is just one type of intrusiveness. Intrusive means : consuming the resources I own ( cpu, mem, disc) or that I pay for (bandwidth). Putting my very own resources at risk with the malvertising. Rendering my interface slow. But mostly : too big, too visible, too noisy, flashy. AFAIK it's one of the points fought by AdBlockPlus : Ad is not the problem, intrusive ad is. It is enough to have one single intrusive ad - the contrary of abundance - to make me install all I can (ADB+, etc file, FlashBlock, etc). Z.
It's not ads per se that are annoying, it's how they affect the browsing experience. Reading Slashdot a few seconds ago - I read one or two sentences of an article, then an image loaded and reformatted the page and the paragraph I was reading disappeared. Found it again, read half a sentence and another image loaded and it disappeared again. I don't have time to chase my article all over the screen. On other sites, I'll read half a paragraph, then it will suddenly wipe everything out (not just scroll it off the screen) while it tries to load some huge object from the network. Or half the page will come down, then stop while it hangs trying to do a DNS lookup or load a giant Flash video from some ad network that's not responding, but none of the remaining text will load while it hangs. This happens so much that I've either stopped reading some sites, or installed ad blockers on computers that I use often. I don't hate the ads - I maybe click on one or two a year - if that's enough to keep things profitable I have no objection. What's unacceptable is the way they negatively impact what I'm actually trying to do.
I'm not sure. The number is a negative value somewhere between googolplex hypercubed and infinity...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It's also a pretty naive position. As things stand the difference between people with ad blockers and without isn't how much they hate advertising, it's how tech savvy they are. If IE came with ad blocking by default then (assuming it worked) it's not like its users would be rushing to turn it off, and it's not like those users suddenly went from loving ads to hating them.
It used to be that ExpertsExchange would show the answers but hide them under a "pop-in" window that wouldn't go away unless you paid... Or unless you used developer tools to remove the elements causing the popup. Then you could read the content for free. Sadly, they've caught on to this and now don't even serve up the answer on the page. (Which, to be honest, is the proper way of doing things. Not that I agree with their business model, but if you're going to do that you don't put the content on the page and then hide it since it's trivial to reveal it.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If I see an ad for something, it had served its purpose. If a buy a Honda partly because of an ad I saw two weeks ago, but didn't click on, it still worked. Maybe the idea of measuring clicks is that clicks and ad effectiveness are well correlated... but I'm too lazy to find any studies.
In the "times long ago", the answers were only available for paid access (or changing your User Agent string).....but Google started ranking them lower for serving up different content to the spiders than to the real people, so they moved the answers all the way to the bottom and just obscuring them. So it isn't as bad now as it used to be.
Which is one of the many reasons why Adblock Plus should be deprecated in favor of Ublock Origin.
Why? Because it encourages the ad industry to change for the benefit of all of us, including those who don't use an ad blocker? I fell that's a damn good reason to keep using it, myself, and just turn off the whitelist if you don't like it. Yes, you can do that, it's one checkbox in the config.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Who do I really represent, then? I'll answer for you, since you're too full of shit to answer for yourself: I represent myself as an end-user. Period. My real name and identity are attached to this account for public view, you can see who I am and what my affiliations are, so I suggest you take a look for yourself and stop talking out of your ass; everyone else can see the truth, as well, so your bullshit just becomes stinkingly obvious to the world when you try to shovel it toward me.
I don't like APK's posts about his program because he has made several personal attacks against me, continuously spams multiple-page ads into forums I participate in (yeah, that's what someone who doesn't want to see ads wants to see... really?) and just generally seems to be somewhat of an entitled and egotistical dick. I don't like his posts because they're precisely the kind of shit I use an ad blocker to avoid seeing. They're ads.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.