Adblock Plus To Offer 'Acceptable Ads' Option 373
Many readers have submitted news of a week-old announcement from Wladimir Palant, creator of Adblock Plus, about a change to the addon that will allow unobtrusive ads to be displayed. The change has been controversial because most people who run the addon strongly dislike seeing any ads. Palant hastens to point out that this is a toggle-able option, and by changing one setting, users can resume ad-less website viewing. Many are upset, however, that the setting defaults to allowing the display of "acceptable" advertisements. The description of "acceptable" ads includes the following criteria: "Static advertisements only (no animations, sounds or similar); Preferably text only, no attention-grabbing images; At most one script that will delay page load (in particular, only a single DNS request)."
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
fork time (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no such thing as "unobtrusive ad", just like there is no "unobtrusive DRM".
With a toggle or not, it's the thought and default what counts, and we need something to recommend to non-technical friends to make their www browsing palatable. I for one go with several partially redundant layers of anti-crap defense and put some time into maintaining them, but ordinary people deserve to have something decent out of the box.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're speculating they're shady - you have no proof Google pays them. Besides, even assuming that they're accepting money from Google in the first place, offering a free add-on which users optionally install and run is hardly a problem, is it? Haven't Google been paying Mozilla to work on the browser this plug-on runs under? Is that shady too?
TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have a problem with this, even if Adblock is getting revenue from it. I want them to be able to continue to support the product, and I want the sites I go to to be able to afford to continue to exist, and I am happy if they are able to make a profit even. We all win. The only reason I started using adblock is because of all the disruptive, distracting, ads that interfere with the actual reason I came to a website in the first place. As long as they're able to keep blocking those, and sites that do tracking, I'm happy...
As long as it's toggle-able... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be a bad move to make it the default. People download this add-on specifically to remove ads, the presumption should be that all ads should be removed.
The best way to handle it would be to just ask the user in plain-english, maybe even explain why they might want to allow such advertisement. Then once the choice is made, never bring it up again. (For example, I don't mind seeing ads for movies because I like to see movies. I don't watch network television, so I never get exposed to movie trailers and I don't know I am missing a movie that might be relevant to my interests. So there are indeed a few cases where I want to allow ads.)
I'm not opposed to non-invasive advertising, and on certain sites, I'll even click an ad from time to time on the sites which I've allowed to advertise to me(assuming the ad was of any interest to me). The ads support the site, and I want the site to continue. I like the idea of advertisers having guidelines to adhere to in order to avoid pissing off viewers. They should already know by now what will piss off viewers, but at least now there's a standard they can point to. For example, if the advertiser has an internal argument between someone who wants a more invasive ad, and someone who wants a less invasive ad, now the guy who wants to use less invasive ads has at least 1 more arrow in his quiver.
If "free" ad-supported content is to survive as ad-blocked viewing methods grow in popularity, somebody needs to keep looking at ads. For that to happen, ads need to evolve into something that gets the point across without pissing off viewers. I didn't mind the brief 15-30 sec Hulu breaks, especially when given the option to give feedback on what kinds of ads they should be serving me with.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
People who aren't tech savvy aren't likely to be installing adblock, and those that are can handle the changing of a single option. The people that are likely to be the most annoyed though are either nerd raging or are in the habit of manually installing huge numbers of installs.
Re:TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think TANSTAAFL really applies. I mean, so my lunch isn't free. OK. What's the price? I suffer? Because, ads or no ads, no money is changing hands here. People who cry that Web sites get money from ads always make the false connection that merely by having me look at ads, the advertiser benefits. That simply isn't the case. That seems like the same argument as the people who claim that every time someone downloads a copy of CS 5.5 from BitTorrent, Adobe loses $1,200. No, it doesn't quite work that way.
Example: Car ads. I don't have a driver's license. No matter how many ads for cars they show me, I won't be buying a car. It might not even be legal for me to buy one (I'm not sure). So watching a 20-second video clip of a CG car driving around some fictitious Autobahn is not only wasting my time, it's also wasting the advertiser's money to show it to me.
Also, maybe I get so tired of seeing the same car ad every 10 minutes in a Hulu video that I start to hate that car and its manufacturer?
I'm sure some Web site owners say, "I don't give a shit about any of that. My contract just says I have to show you the ad." But to me, that's shortsighted thinking. In the long run, advertisers are only going to want to advertise where it's effective. If some people are so hostile to advertising that they use AdBlock, why not leave them alone? How is wasting that person's time and causing them more frustration going to pay for that Not-Free Lunch? The only people who really benefit are the middlemen -- the ad agencies -- and you know what Bill Hicks said about them. [youtube.com]
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
I use adblock because I don't like ads. Or the principle of advertising. If I need something, I look for it. If don't know about something, then I won't care if I don't have it will I? I'll be happy as a pig in shit. Yet somehow to support television, magazines and the internet we have to be fed an endless stream of trash that will invariably end up in the landfills that spoil the countryside after it is thrown away by the morons that actually buy it even though it has no relevance to what they were watching or reading or listening to just because someone somewhere has brainwashed them into buying it by showing it next to a nice pair of tits.
If advertisers were better at advertising, (Score:5, Insightful)
we wouldn't need AdBlock at all. For example, who complains about ads on the Google search page? The ads are highly relevant, and largely unobtrusive. If advertisers were smarter, they'd go one step beyond Google and give the consumer direct control of their ad placement. I don't mind ads when I'm buying, but when I'm not, I want them out of the way. Sounds like a UI problem to me. How hard would it be to solve?
Re:Reasons for negative response (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. I will criticize an ad-blocking project for making revenue agreements with whitelisted advertisers.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
Online ads don't end up in landfill, but i fully agree there...
I hate unsolicited junkmail ads and will never buy anything advertised therein. They go straight in the recycling bag and are terribly wasteful.
I also detest people who cold call, either on the phone or in person and will never purchase their offerings.
If I want something, i will actively go and look for it.
Ads that include any form of sound especially irritate me, and are the main reason i installed adblock in the first place... I also dislike garish animated ads, and those that delay access to the content but nothing is worse than sound... Especially when you can't work out which of your many browser tabs is making the noise!
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:2, Insightful)
People download this add-on specifically to remove ads, the presumption should be that all ads should be removed.
Well, kind of. I use AdBlockPlus as a security measure, because a depressing amount of malware is served via animated ads. I don't actually care about blocking ads as such; in fact I like the idea of sites I like receiving revenue for my pageviews. (As opposed to the site ducking behind a paywall.) A default option to allow static, text-based ads doesn't undermine my ABP use-case at all. I can only presume that (for once!) I'm actually part of the intended audience.
I think your argument above has a lot to do with their choice of default options. The "guy who wants to use less invasive ads" has a lot more arrows in his quiver if he knows that many zillions of ABP users who don't change the default will actually see the less-obtrusive ads.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Many are upset, however, that the setting defaults to allowing the display of "acceptable" advertisements."
Considering the "acceptable" advertisement criteria (no animations, sounds or similar) I've no problem with that. Text or static ads are welcome, particularly if they are paying the bills for what I'm reading. I intensely despise video/audio ads, anything animated and will stop what I'm doing to kill them dead and do whatever is necessary to never see them again. Pretty galling what some people seem to consider acceptable advertising behaviour. It's really bad when you have two audio/video ads playing at the same time.
Reminds me of the mob... (Score:5, Insightful)
Adblock developers have previously tried to monetarize the addon in very shady ways. I bet this is just another one of those.
*long whistle* Nice ads you have there! It'd be a shame if someone were to come along and block 'em. *extends hand*
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
I also use adblock because I also don't like ads, but you're missing an important piece of the principle of advertising. You hit on why advertisers are willing to pay for ads, but you ignored the reason why people let them place the ads on their websites, radio stations, etc. It's to pay for the service. Running a website may be cheap, but it's not free.
So here's their options: paywall or ads. We all know which one works, and which one doesn't.
We all like "free" stuff, and ads are what make the "free" world tick.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
Naive people installing products they don't know anything about is why there's a thriving anti-malware industry.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why the asshole that runs noscript silently killed ad-block without telling users, so that his ads would be seen.
"Asshole"?? That's an awful lot of hate for someone who's probably just trying to pay for his development time, and gives an excellent extension away for free. I dislike internet ads as much as the next guy, but come on -- was loading the noscript home page what, at most once every week, really going to hurt you in any way, shape or form?
Sheesh, sometimes I feel bad about not maintaining my own software projects, as I never have enough time and don't make any money from them; and then I read comments like yours and suddenly I don't mind as much. Some people feel way too over-entitled.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ads that include any form of sound especially irritate me, and are the main reason i installed adblock in the first place... I also dislike garish animated ads, and those that delay access to the content but nothing is worse than sound... Especially when you can't work out which of your many browser tabs is making the noise!
And the thing is a lot of people get annoyed by obnoxious ads so they install an ad-blocker (usually ABP for firefox users) and end up blocking the non-obnoxious adds as a side affect.
The web is mostly funded by ads so IMO it's perfectly reasonable for an adblock vendor to seperate the descision of blocking obnoxious ads from the decision to block all ads.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:3, Insightful)
Naive people installing products wise people encourage them to install is why there's a little bit less malware out there than it ought to be. Sigh.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
Websites like wikipedia, who have to beg for donations on every page for quite a while in spite of being one of the biggest and most used web sites in the world. And... no one else.
Personally I find myself more annoyed by wikipedia's begging (which is a huge ass banner on top of every page not blocked by adblock), then by small banners on my whitelisted sites.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but that massive fucking banner at the top of every Wikipedia page in existence looks A LOT like an advertisement with them begging for money to me.
But hey, common sense and intelligence isn't something that should be associated with someone talking about Wikipedia anyway.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:2, Insightful)
What a lack of imagination that statement shows.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
Long before paywalls, back even before ads became widespread, there was still an internet. If I was having trouble with something, I would use one of the primitive search engines of the time to look for help, and I would find a site or usenet post in which some academic or enthusiast had worked out the solution and shared it with the world.
Nowadays, that helpful site may still exist, but it's buried among thousands of ad-laden commercial sites - which won't help me with my problem, but are quite happy to try to sell me all sorts of junk that's vaguely related to it. Perhaps, if the advertisers gave up because everyone used an effective ad-blocker, and the search engines didn't index the paywalled material, we could get the old, helpful internet back.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who screws with the configuration or other software on my system without my permission or knowledge deserves hate. If you feel otherwise feel free to support him, buy software from Tax-Cut, etc. If someone screws with other software on my machine without permission I'll boycott them and make sure to inform others of the issue. I've gladly unblocked ad sites to support Hulu, etc, because they asked. I've got no problem supporting folks who ask for it. I have a real problem with folks who muck with my machines without asking.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess thats why all open source software, websites like wikipedia, are ad supported. Oh wait, they are not.
The vast majority of sites that do not charge users money are supported by ads. One example of a site with no ads (Wikipedia) is not an argument that all web sites have a moral obligation not to show ads. Don't want ads? Don't use sites that have them.
Open source software that requires more than one developer and does not suck genrally has a corporate sponsor that makes money on it somehow. For example:
* Linux: Most kernel committers work at companies that pay them to do it. (IBM, RedHat, Oracle, Google)
* WebKit: Mostly Apple, some Google engineers.
* Firefox: Google gives them over 80% of their revenue. Look at the commit logs: The vast majority of contributions come from people working on Firefox as a full time job at Mozilla.
* LLVM: Notice how the project really took off once Apple's gcc team started working on it? The GPL3 change pushed them from gcc to LLVM/clang.
Name an open source project that has a large user base and no programmers paid to make it not suck.
Advertising is a sick cancer on the mind. ALL advertising should be banned, and we should move to an unbiased review model of product promotion.
You want ban me from hearing an ad? What sort of tyrannical, evil, control-freak are you? I will decide for myself what speech I choose to listen to. And if I have to water a metaphorical tree with your blood, so be it.
Why not treat web pages as loss leaders? (Score:2, Insightful)
You say, "So here's their options: paywall or ads."
But there is a third option to this: GTFO.
The Internet worked just fine back in the 1970s and 1980s before it was commercialized to such a stringent degree. Who says that viewers of your web page should be the ones paying for it? Has it ever occurred to you that your web page itself is the advertisement? Develop a viable business otherwise, and then go ahead and post a webpage to advertise your business if you like. But don't expect us to pay for it. Support your webpage through the proceeds of your business. Your web page is an ad.
Seriously, this isn't too hard to figure out. Not EVERYTHING has to be "monetized."
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:4, Insightful)
I also blame blatant encouraged consumerism. and sites like fatwallet, slickdeals and their like.
go visit those sites and see how greedy people are. and how they'll throw money away at things 'because its a very low price!'.
good example: some crap company (meritline) sells chinese junk that is guaranteed to fail quickly. one day they have 1/8" stereo phono jack adapters for a dollar or something very low. people pounce on the site and china ships this crap over. the tip/ring/sleeves come apart, they flake off 'shiny bits' and your stereo gets ruined along with the cable. because the stereo is no longer fixable you throw them BOTH out.
"but the cable was only a dollar! I could not refuse that!"
that's the reply I hear. its so cheap, what the hell. right? what the hell, its only a dollar.
and so the mind numbing goes. no thinking about how the dollars add up and who ships the junk where and where it ultimately ends up (our landfills). our dollars, one by one, end up overseas and we are HAPPY to feed that habit.
this whole cycle makes me sick. and its ingrained in our youth. go to the 'deals' sites and see the kids jump on all the stupid junk that's being advertised their way. and that's the tie-in to the parent post: if we were not so accepting of the very concept of advertising, we would not be making so many stupid short-sighted buying decisions. there really is such a think as too much buying. its destructive behavior in so many ways.
advertising is inherently evil, I think. we need to admit this and try to find other ways. to just say 'its how life is' is WRONG. its NOT how life is. its how we made life for ourselves in the last 50 or 100 years. before that, we did not have these notions at all and its not needed for man's survival or even happiness.
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:5, Insightful)
People download this add-on specifically to remove ads, the presumption should be that all ads should be removed.
I disagree. Although I've known about AdBlock for years, I only recently installed it (a couple months ago). I did not want to block all ads - only the annoying ones. I believe it was an ad that started playing a loud video when I accidentally hovered the mouse over it for a second at 5am that finally got me to install ABP.
As a small business owner who has to run at least some ads to get new customers, it was a bit disheartening to see that by default, every ad on every site is blocked with ABP. I still can't find an option to only block certain types of ads - only the option to block ads from certain hosts. Since most of my customers and potential customers are computer savvy 18-30 year olds, a large percentage of them use AdBlock. I don't want to annoy anyone with ads, but if all ads are blocked by default, 95% of people would never change that setting, even if they aren't bothered by static ads.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And money changes hands... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok. Devil's advocate. Say I invent a new product. I think it could really help a lot of people out, if only they knew it existed-- how do I tell them?
Sometimes an Ad is just an Ad - A middle ground (Score:4, Insightful)
A few days ago, I just went on about how I block all ads, and don't see advertising. However... I'd allow "acceptable" ads.
Without ads, there would be no Google, no Facebook, no free internet. There would be 1,000 Wikipedias, begging for money. You can't build billions of dollars worth of data centers on sunshine and ponies.
I use Spiceworks [spiceworks.com]. It would be worth millions to their company, able to charge hundreds per copy if they chose. But it's 100% free. I specifically have enabled ads on their web based tools. Why? #1 - I want to support them. #2 - The ads aren't garbage, they are relevant. Very very relevant. I learn about new IT offerings and products through the ads.
Now granted, there are those who will never click an ad. And companies are learning, consumers want ads relevant to them and unobtrusive. I run ad blocking myself, but I'm not 100% behind the idea that I don't want to see any ads. Right now, it's an all or nothing, or manually turning on each site. I want to do the right thing AND have utter crap held at bay.
This is why I think this is a great tool. Rather than saying, "No ads, never, no way!" This is saying to advertisers, "Do a better job, and don't annoy the shit out of people or track them when they don't want to be tracked... and people are willing to see and click on those."
You can try to fight a war of attrition against ads. Or, they can be encouraged to be better.
And so I can't take the position that there's a vast conspiracy of subliminal trash being force fed into our minds by greedy corporations. I'm sure that's true especially in mass media.
But as Sigmund Freud might say, "Sometimes an ad is just an ad."