Google Launches Service To Replace Web Ads With Subscriptions 319
An anonymous reader writes: Everyone understands by now that ads fund most of the sites on the web. Other sites have put up paywalls or started subscription bonuses, with varying success. Google, one of the web's biggest ad providers, saw a problem with that: it's a huge pain for readers to manage subscriptions for all the sites they visit — often more trouble than it's worth. And, since so few people sign up, the subscription fees have to be pretty high. Now, Google has launched a service called Contributor to try to fix this situation.
The way Contributor works is this: websites and readers can opt in to the service (and sites like Imgur, The Onion, and ScienceDaily already have). Readers then pay a fee of $1-3 per month (they get to choose how much) to gain ad-free access to all participating sites. When the user visits one of the sites, instead of showing a Google ad, Google will just send a small chunk of that subscription money to the website instead.
The way Contributor works is this: websites and readers can opt in to the service (and sites like Imgur, The Onion, and ScienceDaily already have). Readers then pay a fee of $1-3 per month (they get to choose how much) to gain ad-free access to all participating sites. When the user visits one of the sites, instead of showing a Google ad, Google will just send a small chunk of that subscription money to the website instead.
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Re:Ads (Score:4, Insightful)
I've done that a few times but always end up uninstalling it. There are too many sites I visit regularly where the ads aren't that obtrusive and the revenu from them is the only compensation the authors are getting for entertaiing me. And, there aren't that may sites I go to anymore where the ads are so bad that I feel I just HAVE to block them. I haven't seen any pop overs or unders or endless spawning popups in a long time. Or.. maybe the browsers are just smart enough to block that crap on their own.
Although... those damn videos that suddenly pop up out of nowhere and ambush you as you scroll... those have me coming close to blocking again!
It's too bad though, it's usually big corps that do evil stuff that makes blocking worthwile and individuals just trying to support themselves while doing what they love that have the reasonable ads.
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Really? Every time I disable adblock, I get a "what the hell" moment. Banner ads, footer ads, ads on both sides of the content, and if the text is more than a paragraph or two, ads in the middle. And for fun, if flashblock is also off, time for some auto-playing video ads.
On it goes.
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I've done that a few times but always end up uninstalling it. There are too many sites I visit regularly where the ads aren't that obtrusive and the revenu from them is the only compensation the authors are getting for entertaiing me.
Why didn't you just whitelist those sites in Adblock's menu?
Re:Ads (Score:4, Insightful)
Haven't seen ads since I installed adblock plus and no script. Cost me nothing.
Exactly. Now I can get off Adblock and start contributing to the websites I visit.
I would happily pay $1-3 per month for an ad-free but publishers-making-money web. I think that they found the sweet spot of enough money to fund the program vs. too expensive for most web users. I signed up before even reading the comments here, I've been waiting for this for years.
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I would happily pay $1-3 per month for an ad-free but publishers-making-money web
But I wonder how much of that would really go to the publisher? If it's like their advertising model, then if we're lucky maybe 10% and Google takes 90%?
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Video ads on a text page (Score:2)
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No, it's somewhere in between.
"I want to visit this movie theater, but they require me to drive 20 miles out of the way for a ticket, in to a dodgy neighborhood where I could get robbed and raped, when I could just walk in the door instead."
Websites did this to themselves. The fact they don't require the ad networks, or even punish them in any way when their users are harmed is what caused this situation.
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It is a nice choice to have.
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I like the idea of micropayments.
however, I don't trust google to manage this. they ONLY do evil, these days, disguised as good.
if google is part of it, I want no part of it. sorry. but I already block anything that has a G domain in it. this would require me to unblock them and that is just 100% unacceptable to me.
we need a truly good company to help make this happen. google is not the way forward. google is PART OF THE PROBLEM!
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If Google ONLY does evil, then I assume that in your universe "good" companies are a rhetorical and theoretical device but cannot possibly exist? The money that Google donates is evil? Giving free-except-for-ads email is evil? Providing services for schools and non-profits is evil? Pushing back against over-broad governmental requests is evil?
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I have no spare money to spend on the overpriced piffle they keep advertising, so why should I waste my time letting them download and putting up with their annoying animations and bullshit?
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If I can afford something and want it, don't worry -- I'll find it. Advertising only works because the average grunt has more money than brains.
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Translation: I'm a worthless freeloader.
While I'm sure you enjoy pop-up ads promising you BIGGER, HARDER, LONGER ERECTIONS taking up most of your screen and flashing like a neon sign, many of us do not, which is why things like Adblock and Flashblock were developed and are so widely used, and the mention of NoScript here is specious at best, since NoScript is intended to help defend our computers from attacks. The point is that if web ads weren't obnoxious and intrusive to start with, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, but advertisers
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Just like all the people who "share" music or software without paying the artists/creator a dime for their work.
Not really.
One obvious difference is that the law generally prohibits copying a copyrighted work without complying with the copyright holder's terms for payment etc. There is no analogous law about downloading freely available content without viewing the ads, unless you want to start arguing that the implicit permission to access that content does not apply if you don't view the ads as well, which is quite the can of worms to open.
Another obvious difference is that buying a legal copy of a creative work doe
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So how does this not make you a worthless freeloader?
You get content that costs someone resources to create and give them nothing not even the ad revenue.
I use adblock but I only use it on sites that have way too much advertising. The ads on most sites tend to be well targeted to me so I am fine with them.
If they play video or sound they get blocked but most ads I see.
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So how does this not make you a worthless freeloader?
I may be literally worthless to such sites. I just don't think they ever had a reasonable expectation that I would be any more than that, any more than someone paying for an ad on a billboard has a reasonable expectation that every driver will stop and read it, or any TV advertiser has a reasonable expectation that no-one is going to go take a leak during the ad break.
There is no law requiring someone to give their time to the ads just because they are there, and there never has been, making this a fundamen
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Ultimately, if someone wants a promise to be paid in return for their work, there are a number of options available to them, starting with charging for it just like every other industry in the world that produces value.
Or they'll switch to angular.js and similar technologies to deliver the content. No js, no content. If adblock interferes, crash the page, log the ip and block the user.
Adblock will of course try to stop this. And the cat & mouse game will have begun.
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So far, I don't see a lot of that happening. Occasionally I see sites begging you to turn your ad-blocker off, and if they're sites I like then I do have some sympathy.
Unfortunately, from bitter personal experience, ad networks are a threat. There is currently no way to reliably distinguish which parts are dangerous soon enough, so the default safest option is to block the lot.
Very occasionally, I do find a site that doesn't work properly because of the things I block, and then I just go somewhere else inst
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You write like a lawyer, you seem to be equating legal/illegal with right/wrong. Those are two very different things!
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Of course they are. But the fact is that when the law says things are required to work a certain way, and everyone knows the deal up-front, breaking that law is a different issue to just not doing something entirely voluntary that someone else would have preferred you to do.
Laws may not perfectly follow morals and ethics, but the intent is that they do at least reflect them reasonably well and provide a common standard for acceptable behaviour that everyone knows.
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Advertisers take this into account. There are researchers finding what percentage of people use adblock, record TV and skip commercials, etc. They use surveys as well as technical resources. A site showing ads hoping to recoup their costs may not have that research information handy (or bothered to look for it) and might blow their expectations of having their "Harp Lessons in G Minor" blog making them a small fortune. But I agree with the Anonymous Brave Guy. There's no law saying we need to watch ads
Static ads vs. animated ads (Score:2)
You get content that costs someone resources to create and give them nothing not even the ad revenue.
I use a click-to-play plug-in, not an ad blocker per se. This is because I'm willing to give them ad revenue, so long as the ads are static (text or PNG/JPEG), as opposed to ads that are animated in a CPU-hogging and data-quota-consuming manner (Flash, video, or Flash video). Yet a lot of sites don't get the hint, and they continue to serve what I see as a white box with a Flash Player logo inside instead of noticing that the Flash ad isn't playing and replacing it with a static ad. Am I still a freeloader?
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I never said I was not a freeloader on those sites. They are few and far between and I do at least give them a chance.
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So how does this not make you a worthless freeloader?
It makes me not a worthless freeloader in exactly the same way as you using an ad network doesn't make you a script kiddie hacker trying to infect millions of peoples computers with malware viruses and keyloggers deserving of imprisonment.
But if you insist on going there, allow me to remind you that my actions of not watching an ad are perfectly legal (and explicitly stated so in law), while your actions of infecting millions of computers is explicitly a federal criminal offense...
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If one were to argue that argument, then one would also be able to hold said sites liable for any virus laden ads they serve up.
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Another obvious difference is that buying a legal copy of a creative work does not in itself subject me to severely degraded system performance, wasting arbitrary amounts of bandwidth I'm already paying for on things I didn't ask for, or assorted security and privacy risks.
Unless the "creative work" is a computer game, of course.
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It seems you forgot to quote the later part of that post, where I did acknowledge the problem of content that comes malware-laden... Personally, I don't buy AAA games any more (nor do I pirate them instead). I got bored of the generally poor quality and accompanying malware breaking things a few years ago. Given the comments I see every time gamers' enjoyment of a big new title is spoiled because someone's DRM screwed up again, I suspect my life is still better that way. However, I do miss and would gladly
Re:Ads (Score:4, Informative)
I've cleaned far too many viruses in my day to trust any ad network at all. They all must be blocked.
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exactly. Even Imgur, one of the sites mentioned in this article (and not exactly an obscure site) is notorious for dodgy as shit ads, including interstitial ads that redirect you to some questionable content.
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I've cleaned systems that got viruses from ads on Fox News, CNN, ESPN and MSN. No one is to be trusted.
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They all must be blocked.
No no, you quoted it wrong: "They should all be destroyed." [youtube.com]
(The laughter at the end there needs a LOT more bass, and a whole lot more "Ha"s. He got it wrong too.)
Combine hosts with ABP (Score:2)
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It's kinda interesting; your posts read a lot like the text on a bottle of Dr. Bronners.
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Bullshit. The World Wide Web ran just fine for over a decade without excruciating ads everywhere. And yes, if you were to ask me which version of the Web I would take, the free but relatively low-key, or the highly commodified wasteland of Capitalism run amok, then of course I would take the old WWW back. I would gladly see this whole JavaScript, Flash riddled shallow 'social' monster that it has become, vanish without a trace.
If running with AdBlock contributes in some small way to the decline of the mater
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I don't know about that. Does anybody do pay-per-view ads anymore? I was under the impression it was mostly pay-per-click. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I clicked an ad, and if I did it was entirely an accident. Unless you're going to go so far as to argue that readers are obligated to click ads on sites they surf to generate money for the site, there isn't a whole lot of functional difference between browsing with ads blocked and ads visible for users who don't click.
Functional difference for th
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I, in fact, scroll past the google ad results when searching just to stop google from getting the revenue.
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[I]s the "Happy Birthday" song copyrighted or some shit?
Maybe [wikipedia.org].
Also, with thanks Mr. Sorkin..
Dan Rydell: I've got the intellectual property cops crawling up my butt.
Isaac: The intellectual property cops?
Dan Rydell: Yeah.
Isaac: Are crawling up your butt?
Dan Rydell: The heat's all over me.
Isaac: What the hell are you talkin' about, Dan?
Dan Rydell: I sang happy birthday to Casey on air.
Isaac: When?
Dan Rydell: Well, on his birthday, Isaac...
Isaac: Someone holds the copyright to "Happy Birthday"?
Dan Rydell: The representatives of Patty and Mildred Hill.
Isaac: Took tw
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Why do you hate freedom? You can't socialize music into your little National Public Domain you goddamned red bastard!
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Their clients are purchasing a service. Not everything is a tangible good
Welp, sold (Score:3)
Signing up for this basically asap.
But if the price is the same no matter how many different sites you consume, or how much of their bandwidth you chew up, well...I'm not sure how I think about that, from an "I want my favorite websites to actually get money" point of view.
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I presume, from the (rather thin) description that your favorite websites are ones you go to more often, so they'll get more of those little chunks of money sent their way, no?
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Depends on how the sites are structured. It's not uncommon for some sites to make users click around a lot to artificially inflate # of ad impressions. If your "favorite" website isn't doing this, and the other ones you are using do, sadly, this encourages the wrong behavior [even further].
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Yea, it's not clear from the linked articles if you contributing more means the site gets more, or whether you get to visit more sites ad free before your contribution runs out.
Plus, a site would have to disable all advertising in order to make it worthwhile. Getting rid of half the ads and replacing them with other annoyances won't fly
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I'm signing up for this as well. If I frequent a site, and they have a subscription, I'll pay for it. Some sites have a lifetime of no ads if you toss them half to a whole C-note, so I do that. Other sites offer donations, so they get â25 or so every so often. I'm sure subscription revenue higher than ad revenue, so it is a win/win.
With it work without tracking? (Score:4, Insightful)
Will this work with google analytics disabled/blocked. If not, no thank you.
Mod parent up. (Score:4, Informative)
My first question is what needs to be allowed in order for this to work? Do I have to whitelist sites in adblock? NoScript? Do I have to abandon those addons?
What about any of the anti-tracking stuff I use?
And, lastly, the main reason I use all of that is because I got very tired of clicking on a site and WAITING FOR ALL THE SHIT TO LOAD AND RELOAD AND RERELOAD.
I might use this. I might not. But there isn't enough information available right now to tell whether it will be better or worse for me than what I'm doing today.
Adblock plus is free (Score:3, Insightful)
That's all.
Re:Adblock plus is free (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Welcome to Slashdot! We just need to take a shit in your mouth so we can keep the doors open, so get ready..."
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Think of it less as a way to avoid ads, more of a way for your favourite sites to stay in business.
Unfortunately I'm not certain how many of the IT / technology website are worth subscribing to. Too many of them are already hollow shills, with writers and "editors" who either lack technical or literary skills if not both. Scarcity of journalism, professionalism, or ethics makes me wonder whether they would just continue to produce more "sponsored content" which is merely advertising being sugar-coated as content, whether new product info, amazingly uncritical glowing reviews, verbatim printing of marketi
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Well, it's "donation-ware." People should really toss the guy a few bucks. That's my subscription plan.
CPM rates, etc (Score:2)
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Well, more than half the trouble with micro-payments is getting you to sign up for an account and tie it to a credit card. Once they have that, they can up-sell you more. And I'm betting Google is giving them a sweet deal because once you need to be signed in to Google to avoid the ads when visiting your favorite sites you'll in practice be signed in 24x7. And if they didn't have a good profile on you before, they sure will now.
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Adblockers are still used by a small minority. With the shift to more mobile browsing it is even less of a threat to advertisers since there is no ad blocking solution that works without rooting your device.
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>no ad blocking solution that works without rooting your device.
Not exactly true. You just use an adblocking proxy.
Micropayments are finally here, YouTube is next (Score:5, Informative)
This could turn into a real micropayment system.
About 7 years ago I (incorrectly) predicted that ISPs could bootstrap micropayment systems by allowing users to put money into an account with their ISP. When the user visits a site with ads, the site could "bill" the customer via the ISP anonymously, transparently to the user, and cheaply. The payment system would essentially live in the ISP's HTTP proxy server.
The Google model sounds like a variation of that, with Google collecting the money and distributing the micropayments to the web site via the ad network.
A similar ad-free subscription-oriented option will be available for YouTube soon. [wsj.com] I am surprised to see this announcement without it connecting to that one.
Adblock... (Score:2)
Or you can just use Adblock like any sane person and just not deal with it, funding be damned.
Honestly I'm the type of person you do NOT want to advertise to. The more annoying the advertising the more likely I am to make it a point to avoid that product / service as much as possible.
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I like this scheme because it allows me to help fund the websites which I enjoy and visit. A good website with good content is expensive, and if the site maintainer cannot make money, then those sites will go away or become less good. I'm happy to spend a few bucks a month knowing that it goes to the sites I like.
I hate advertising too, but I know enough economics to know that if everyone is a freeloader then the whole system goes to hell.
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Does anyone else find it incredible to see THREE useless spam bot replies to my post advertising an anti-advertising product?
Flattr (Score:3, Interesting)
Dear Google,
Why didn't you just buy Flattr instead? https://flattr.com/ [flattr.com]
(And pay off Brokep's debt while at it)
Google is a freaking genius (Score:3)
Because when you do this, you are giving google information on all the websites you visit.
Want to advertise to people that visit the Onion? Well, google can do that now - as soon as you leave the Onion, your next ad will be for Cracked.com or some other funny website in competition with The Onion.
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"Because when you do this, you are giving google information on all the websites you visit."
You must be new here, almost every website you visit has ad/trackers embedded in the webpage. Go get ghostery and look at all the shit on slashdot by itself.
https://www.ghostery.com/en/ [ghostery.com]
Go to other places on the web and see all "hidden servers" you're pulling data from. All the webpage has to do is refer to the server for them to track you. There is an infinite number of ways for you to be tracked without your cons
Invite link? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually, most ads ARE Google ads. They're just done by companies and ad networks Google owns. After all, they have like 98% marketshare, while the 2% belong to those more questionable networks (the ones that advertise for sites that Google won't touch - e.g., torrent sites and the like).
Which brings up the
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After all, they have like 98% marketshare, while the 2% belong to those more questionable networks (the ones that advertise for sites that Google won't touch - e.g., torrent sites and the like).
Actually, 33%. They're by far the biggest single player, but aren't anywhere close to 98%. Google's share of mobile ads is larger, at 56%.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/06/13/in-online-ads-theres-google-and-then-everybody-else/ (that's 2013, but things haven't changed much in 2014, and I couldn't find a 2014 link that included both all digital and mobile ads).
Pop-up ads (Score:2)
The ads are replaced with a small message thanking them for being a contributor. The space where the advert would have been is filled with a pixelated pattern, instead of being removed entirely
Maybe we'll get to see pop-ups with pixelated messages of thanks!
The Genius of Google... (Score:2)
The real genius here is that after people accept this business model, Google can charge a premium to advertisers to "break through" to the user... I'm sure it's in the fine print already... you can pay to ignore "standard" tier advertisements, but it says nothing of Premium tier.
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No advertiser would pay extra for that. They'd pay less for having an angry viewer.
How clever is that? (Score:2)
How clever is Google... being paid to display ads and also being paid not to display ads.
It's a win-win.
Do no eViL -- yeah, right! ;-)
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How clever are they for listing the companies who have signed up and NOT making them a link to the company's web page.
Interesting taking cues from other industries (Score:2)
the first one is free, the next ones you pay for... So Google creates a shit load of addicts that will want to pay them to remove the ads that they posted in the first place. Whats that remind me off, drug dealers and protection rackets.
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You might notice that there exist only two industries in which the customer is called "a user".
Cable TV Anyone? (Score:2)
Remember how cable TV was supposed to be ad (commercial) free, because the subscription fee was supposed to be the primary source of revenue? How long did that last?
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We don't remember because we're not that old. I'm 42 and I've never seen TV without commercials before Netflix arrived, if we count Netflix in the same category as "TV".
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You are that old, you just probably don't remember. It was way back when MTV played music videos.
New York Times subscription +++ ads! (Score:2)
I have a subscription to the NY Times.
I still get loads of ads on my tablet with no adblock.
Adblock is your friend.
Alright! (Score:2)
I'm going to add that to my website! I'm pretty sure I'll be able to make a profit of 25 cents before the end of 2015!
This solves the wrong problem for me (Score:2)
I'd love to be able to assist with this project. However, my issue is not advertising, but tracking. By using this method, one must, by definition, allow Google to see how many times you visit which sites, and how much time you spend on each.
Presently, I use FoolDNS and Ghostery, and intentionally allow ads through - I want websites to be able to get additional ad traffic. I'm perfectly okay with ads. Personally, I've got two rules: 1.) Don't track me, and 2.) Don't infect my computer with malware. I person
Or you can just install an ad blocker... (Score:2)
I use AdBlock Pro as a browser extension.
However, I'm excited about the prospect of installing it on a router, and that's what I'm gonna do on my new Asus RT-AC87.
I currently run OpenWRT on a D-link DIR-825, and guessing I could install it there. But I want 802.11ac and a router that can handle a VPN connection at something closer to my cable modem throughput (currently, 120mbps down/20mbps up). The DIR-825's CPU is out of gas.
OpenWRT for the AC87 will likely never happen, or be hobbled by open-source drive
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Do you really want to help fund sites that tricked you to go there in the first place? This will just encourage even more SEO BS,
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So you are saying that you should not help fund sites you like because you may accidentally send a fraction of a cent to a site you didn't mean to go to. Occasionally.
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What I'd expect is that the boxes where the ads were will be empty, but the layout of the website (tailored originally around those boxes) will be identical.
Competent CSS will result in the boxes being gone and the page re-flowing.
The Firefox add-on Stylish allows you to do this with any web site. I do it with Slashdot to make the comments fill my browser from left to right margin.
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What I'd expect is that the boxes where the ads were will be empty, but the layout of the website (tailored originally around those boxes) will be identical.
Competent CSS will result in the boxes being gone and the page re-flowing.
So you're saying that this will not work well with most sites?
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