Adblock developer offers 'please unblock me' tag to sites
Fresh from a bizarre food fight with rival Giorgio Maone of NoScript, Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant has offered an olive branch to publishers - and along with it, an opportunity for his users to show that they're not a bunch of parasitic freeloaders. Essentially, Palant is offering up a dialogue where publishers first …
It seems that the beef with ads isn't their existence but the volume and lack of relevance, quantity not quality I believe the phrase goes.
If only there existed some way of monitoring your browsing habits and serving up a smaller but more targeted selection of ads; wouldn't the world be such a better place?
This certainly appears to be a difficult problem. I'm adamant about blocking ads- I don't want to see any. It's already a given that I'll never click through any of them, and I simply don't want the distraction. On the other hand, I do want to support creators of quality reading & viewing material. As it is, I pay a few websites a subscription, never log in and then block the ads when visiting. This neatly solves the problem of preserving relative anonymity while getting the authors paid and keeping advertising out of my household. It's tenuous though- it will break when a site detects blocking and serves different content based on blocking status.
I've paid donations to numerous other sites, again where a system is established for doing so. But many (perhaps the great majority of) sites don't offer any option to sell subscriptions or accept donations.
To my mind, the ideal solution would involve a re-integration of internet access providers and hosting providers. This way, access fees could variably subsidize hosting costs as well as authoring costs. Users would pay an access fee, the access providers pay the hosts and authors, and are well positioned to know how much they need to pay out to each based on what is generating the traffic.
It would certainly upset the ecosystem to switch over to such an arrangement, so I don't expect anyone to implement it anytime soon, but I do think it would create the right break from so much advertising dependence. No more freetards vs. click-hungry zombie marketers.
Yep, am very curious to see how this will play out. Am starting to get very pissed of with the SMH here in Sydney. Their Adds are way too Aggressive.
And, frankly, I couldn't care less. I have ABP installed and block everything in sight except google ads, which by and large don't irritate me and occasionally prove vaguely useful. In general I simply hate advertising since if I do actually want or need something, I'll go and seek it out, and wouldn't click on the in-yer-face ads in any case, however much they try to irritate me.
I don't want to see decent sites fold, but there are few enough sites on the net that I use that a modest subscription (or micropayments) would be fine by me. The ones that bleat the loudest about the magnificence of their 'free' content and the need for revenue are in general sites I wouldn't go near. I run sites myself with hopefully unobtrusive ads; people can block or not as they like. As mentioned above, if they do block, they are the kind of people (like me) unlikely to click through even if they were forced to see ads.
If the whining pricks who turned the web into an epileptics nightmare want to know why people use ABP, they need only look in the mirror. They seem to dwell in some weird alternate twilight world where their arguments sound reasonable, and people really, REALLY do want exciting and relevant ads - honest.
Most people find print ads acceptable (very easy to block out, but advertisers remain happy), perhaps if advertisers removed their heads from their collective arses for long enough, they might find theres a learning experience in there somewhere. Every additional step of control they are given, leads them to fuck up a little bit further. TV ads are traditionally to have a wazz or put the kettle on. Ramping the volume up on the ads simply guarantees the 'mute' button gets an outing.
Anyone who remembers what the web was like before ads will remember the hell it descended into once ads started to appear - virtually unusable. I'd be happier to see the web melt down to a few hundred thousand amateur sites than to start viewing ads like some dutiful drone. Life really is too short.
Those who find a way to make their business pay, and those who don't will fail. Anyone who believes the idea that ads are some perpetual motion machine that will make the rich richer forever is seriously deluded. The harder they push, the more people will bite back - and ABP will not be the last word.
@ Highlander - perfectly put.
As usual, there are exaggerations on both sides. You seem to think that anyone using an ad blocker systematically steals other people's lunch. Not so. And I will pass on your lightning-quick association with pirating music which has nothing to do in this debate and is much too troll-like to my taste.
Ads used to be simple still images. I had no problem with those, they didn't keep me from reading what I had actually come to read. Then they became animated images. At that point came the difference between usefully-animated-but-still-could-be-ignored and horribly-flashing-annoying-piece-of-crap-begging-to-be-shot. Not to mention Flash-based ads that are heavier than the page I actually want to see.
And don't get me started on popup ads that cannot be closed or other such malware-enhanced nuisances.
As a result, and because the ad industry has not been able to keep itself in check, I use AdBlock since I cannot stand having things shoved in my face, and ad makers do not seem to know anything else these days (I know, I know, that's an exaggeration as well).
What I would like to see is a mod of AdBlock that allows simple, still image ads and blocks all the other crap. After all, an ad in a magazine cannot be animated either, yet there are plenty so it must be useful enough.
What I would also like to see the next time you go in a store is a pair of ugly fat ladies in garishly pink tutus following you around and constantly yelling to your face to buy Mountain Dew. I'm sure you wouldn't mind shopping like that, since otherwise you're just a freetard music pirate, right ?
I'm happy to block all ads irrespective of merit or tastefulness. If I want to use third party software to filter the web I'm well within my rights to do so.
I already contribute a substantial percentage of my income to various online shops so it's not as if I'm not doing my bit for the economy. I just object to having my buying decisions influenced by every tom dick and harry with 10 megs of web space and a WYSIWYG HTML editor.
If the only way you can make money is getting paid pittance to thrust random products in peoples faces maybe you need to rethink your business plan.
The mere act of viewing adverts does not make money for anyone. Money is *only* made when somebody actually *buys* the product or service being advertised. An advertisement shown to somebody *and which does not result in a sale* is a wasted effort.
When companies actually get this, perhaps we can return to some sort of sanity? Please?
"I pay my ISP for internet access, and I pay BT for the wires that it runs on, and I have to get a new mortgage every quarter to pay my electricity bill for the PC."
And how much of that goes to the people making the content? Precisely nothing.
Would you rather have an ignorable ad, or should we be charged a fee for every webpage we visit that goes to the owner of the site?
I'm happy to have adverts that don't pop-up, automatically play music or take up most of the page. I don't care about them moving - I am quite capable of ignoring a moving image. I'm quite happy to have adverts interspersed in streaming videos at reasonable intervals also.
Nice response. I concede that not all adblocking people pirate music/software and I assure you it wasnt a troll. My point was the frequent posts with reference to DRM, Anti-Piracy and any kind of copywrite laws also seem to come from the same people who aren't prepared to tolerate a little advertising.
I also take your point in reference to annoying ads. Yes shouty multi-media ads are often irritating and I wouldn't miss them if they vanished.
I suspect you were not my target for my original comment. It was more aimed at the less reasonable block everything, pay for nothing crowd.
If web hosters need to rely on ads and donations just to keep a site running, they shouldn't even have made one to begin with. It's like asking people to pay for the content you can also get everywhere else. If its good and worthwhile, people will be obliged to donate or support in some way or form. But not when its forcing people or telling them that if they don't receive a certain amount during the months end it will be shutdown. Then again, 75-80% of web users at most won't bother with adblocks or are too inclinded or illicit to know of such things. That is why many users still use IE today as much as the already known Firefox.
The internet does not belong to the advertisers. The marketing slimeballs trample all over OUR internet, plaster it all over in hideous ads, bend over backwards to invent as many nasty techniques and back-handed tactics as they could to foist them upon any and all passers-by, and then WE are the parasites for objecting to this antisocial behaviour?
And no, that banner ads are somehow perceived as a valid business model funding many web sites is frankly not my problem. I'm sure that adorning buildings in meters-high fluorescent advertising posters is considered a marketing success too, but if anyone dares complain that I point my head the other way when passing one of them they will be pissed on from a great height.
Fuck advertisers and the hole they crawled out from.
I don't understand why advertising funded sites aren't detecting ad-blockers and just not serving content to them.
Seems obvious.
As Adblock knows how many ads it has blocked from a site - perhaps an option to limit the number of ads per page would be more workable. e.g. The user could limit adblock to show 1 ad only - and block all other ads (or even block all ads for pages which have more than 1 ad). This may force developers to at least stop having pages filled with ads.
I foresee a situation with the proposed solution that ALL developers claim to be squeekly clean on non-intrusive ads (even when they are not), and users just stop believing them - and revert back to blocking all.
Personally (business oportunity here) I would like to use a search engine which (using some inteligence from AdBlock) displays how many ads are in the linked page with the search results, with an option to sort the results by number of ads - any offers?
Wrong.
Can't find it right now, but there was a report released a couple of days ago that showed how much residual influence an advert could have. Sometimes they are really only intended to be there for Brand Awareness, you know, like adverts on TV, Radio, newspapers, bill-boards, and all those other places where click-through isn't technically possible.
That is why some advertisers are prepared to pay merely for 'impressions' - after all, not all of them even have a product to sell, directly.
Another problem with all of this escalation is that many corporate networks have built-in filters that block Flash, in particular. If publishers are forced to block users who fail to download adverts, a lot of them are going to lose a lot of traffic un-intentionally.
Also difficult to see how subscriptions are going to work for corporate networks. For those that think subscriptions and/or micro-payments are the big panacea, just have a wee look at how long that concept has been around, and how many sites are able to do so successfully.
Did anybody else go to InfoSec this year and find it ironic that in Earls Court 1 we had InfoSec with its security tools, and in Earls Court 2 we had the Web/Internet 'how to make money' show, discussing ads, content tracking etc - all of which were trying to be blocked by products in the hall next door. :-)
I hate it when decent news sites start using multiple ads per page, sometimes the same damned ad for in different shapes/sizes. I also hate the flash ad that starts in the corner of the web browser and rolls down the page to cover up the article at my local tv station's news site. There are also the ads that render on top of the article and are no way removable so I can read the article unabridged. Those sites get closed and mentally tagged not to visit anymore.
I have abandoned useful websites for their ads such as wunderground.com back 5 or so years ago when they were using 3 popups, 6 images and rollovers per f'ing page. I've come back to using that website just this year. Looks better, fewer ads now, though I don't dare visit it with any version of IE. IE cant manage to stop popups despite having a popup blocker built in.
Noticed AVF Forums somehow detects the use of Adblocker and displays a begging message for you to disable it for their site. As they put their ads in tables and the begging message is of similar size then you might as well disable it!
This won't work, it is a nice idea but there are the few who have ruined it for everyone else by plastering sites in intrusive adverts. If there is an option added it will just be abused.
I wonder how many of the alleged "freetards" are also hot-linkers, trying to leech off of some other private individual's bandwidth without permission (stealing images or other content) *and* seeing nothing wrong with it or why anyone would think it's wrong. "But gee, it's on the internet so it's free, right, I just linked to it, what's wrong with that?" Sigh.
Thank God for .htaccess <evil grin>
If people are too stupid to enable the hotlink protection almost all commercial web space gives you then stuff em.
But I have my own web space so no need or desire to hotlink.
<<If people are too stupid to enable the hotlink protection almost all commercial web space gives you then stuff em.>>
I run my own servers, and don't have any sort of 'hotlink protection'. I'm also not stupid.
"No requests would then be sent for content to the advertiser's webserver. All this would be client side and the origin website should know nothing about it."
If the adblocker is being detected, how is it done? Does the browser leak information about its currently loaded plugins to any website that asks? Sounds like a damn silly idea if so. Explanations would be most welcome."
If the adverts are on the same site, then you can check the server logs in real time. If a browser loads (say) 2 pages in a row without any ad images loaded also, then you know the ads are being blocked.
If the adverts are on a third-party site, it would be possible for them to provide a realtime 'log feedback' to the original server, so a similar check could be done.
Maybe the next step would be to still fetch the ads, and just not display them..
An inphormative comment, but I think you'd still get the same number of adverts. Just ones more accurately reflecting what you (and anyone else who happened to have been using the same PC) were interested in yesterday and not what you would be interested in next day.
You may also have to regularly sweep your machine for Rootkits, because you could probably never trust some of the slime entering the market place not to go back to old habits.
You may also have to think about curtailing the kind of browsing you do, because although your machine may be tagged with some kind of unique identity, your browsing interests would have still to be kept *_somewhere_* so they could be associated with the unique identity, and the right garbage - sorry, ads - served up to your ID.
It's be a short step from putting two and two together and deciding who you were.
Don't Private Investigators do much the same from time to time?
" Noticed AVF Forums somehow detects the use of Adblocker and displays a begging message for you to disable it for their site. As they put their ads in tables and the begging message is of similar size then you might as well disable it!
This won't work, it is a nice idea but there are the few who have ruined it for everyone else by plastering sites in intrusive adverts. If there is an option added it will just be abused."
No fancy ABP detection here, its simply called a "background image".
