Comments on: Blocking Ad-Blockers

By: disasterman

disasterman — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:01:32 +0000

BTW, Yahoo music apparently has decided not to allow it’s site to work on Firefox…….

Claims Firefox is “unsupported”. “UNSUPPORTED?!” It’s the w3 STANDARD for pete’s sake!

By: disasterman

disasterman — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 16:58:46 +0000

Going back to the starting premise of this thread, I employ the Firefox ADBlock extension for the same reasons stated by Howie at the beginning of these responses. Web advertisers are greedily vicious. Nothing is ever enough for them. They can’t just run contextual banner ads at the bottom, top, or sides of a page and call it good.

Nope, they have to take over your computer, scream at you, clog your computer and ruin it’s performance with content you never wanted, and in short RUIN your web experience.

From annoying pop-ups and pop-overs and pop-unders, to scripted takeovers of size and positioning of windows, malicious endless loops that the user can’t cancel without purposely crashing the browser using task manager, to stealthy down loaders, the advertisers and their developers have made the internet horrific for many, just as spammers have ruined email. There is NO reason or justification for the degree to which developers pummel us with this crap.

By: felix

felix — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 01:23:30 +0000

Interesting, although a more complex system does end up requiring more on the content providers end - which the ol’ user agent trick, kinda didn’t.

I think that ad-blockers are less of a draw than popup blockers - those things actively made surfing almost impossible at times. For the most part on most sites, ads are relatively unobtrusive (compared to a world full of popups).

But I’d love to see something like that happen. Man, I’d love it. I’d pay more attention to ads, since I’d be actively trying to send advertisers a message about which ads I hated. :)

By: Kirk Unit

Kirk Unit — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 22:04:35 +0000

One more point — such a system would obviously require some kind of introspection into the various multimedia ad formats.

Actually, Adobe could just build this concept into the Flash player — a preference setting that disables certain animation techniques, for which the Flash animation could provide alternate creative.

By: Kirk Unit

Kirk Unit — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 22:00:38 +0000

There are already examples of scalable, robust systems that let browsers and web servers negotiate automatically — p3p, for example. I think if there’s a serious market out there for people who want to pick and choose which ads they want to see, there is absolutely a technology that will let rational solutions form.

It’s arguable that most people won’t ever even take advantage of this, but then again, pop-up blockers became universal; this idea is just the logical extension of those.

By: felix

felix — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 20:08:44 +0000

that’s an interesting idea. I think that one issue will be the granularity of this - it isn’t necessarily size or type, but rather obnoxiousness of the ad that is one major problem. So, I don’t mind flash ads, but ads that start playing sound or roll out to cover the whole screen or whatever - or flash epileptic fit inducing lights at me… It’d be great to have some means of automatically reporting which ads specifically bother me and that I’m not viewing. But, that’s probably too much for anyone to deal with. Sigh.

At any rate, it’s a good idea in theory, I’d like to see how it’d work in practice.

By: Kirk Unit

Kirk Unit — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 19:43:04 +0000

Why not have the adblock extension alter the browser’s USER_AGENT to alert the site that the user is blocking either a certain class of ads (e.g., >35k, Flash, etc.)? That lets the site know what kind of ads piss people off, and lets them calm their advertisers’ fears about ad blocking — or, conversely, lets them help their advertisers create ad banners that are find a more receptive audience.

It would also give the site the right to block out users who completely refuse ads, but isn’t that the nature of a free society? You have the right to refuse to receive the ads that go with my content, and I have the right to then not show you my content.

By: felix

felix — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 11:57:40 +0000

May, that’s a good point. Pervasive selective use of an AdBlocker could punish those really annoying ads while leaving less annoying or more useful ads to continue to appear. It’d be the darwin of ads! (since right now, unfortunately, the more annoying the ad, the more successful it is likely to be).

By: May C

May C — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 21:59:43 +0000

There is no way I can deal with a lot of sites that offer these annoying Flash ads, or the animation ones. I use Adblock Plus for the really annoying ones like the intellitext ones and others. Most times, I don’t block ads that are static ones, just the ones that do a lot of animation and moving and won’t stop.

By: felix

felix — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:14:45 +0000

Well, I don’t think people are lowering the bar. I think that it is, to a large degree, the price that people pay to get all the content and services that are on the web now. Every social network is nearly 100% if not 100% ad driven. If no more ads? No more social networks. Every magazine on the net? Ad driven, it drives subscriptions, too, but ad money is a good portion of income from the web. Services like gmail? Ad driven. The web2.0 boom? Ad driven.

So if everyone had ad blocking turned on, those would all go away. Who knows, that might be an interesting return back to ‘94, but the web as it runs now wouldn’t really be there anymore. But, since I don’t think it is even within the realm of conception at this point that any non-trivial portion of the internet users is going to use ad blocking, people’s reactions against the extension are overblown and crazy.