AdBlock Plus, websites draft peace deal so ads can bypass blockade The developer of AdBlock Plus is in talks with website owners to seal a deal that would allow more adverts to bypass the ad-blocker and appear in people's browsers. Eyeo, makers of the open-source utility, is drafting a pact with a group of publishers to settle the ongoing battle between ad-blockers and websites that rely on …
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"For the rest, (irritating text-based adverts, lightboxes and popups), disable javascript."
You know, funnily enough, every now and then something randomly breaks execution of javascript in Firefox, so no scripts run after that until I restart or at least reload the tab. And guess what - you know how I know when that happens...? I know because starting with the very next click the website in question becomes inoperable and unnavigable - nothing happens, because many, many websites just don't use any actual HTML links much anymore. Any action and all links are performed / substituted on-the-fly by scripts - it's like those integrated single-blob-single-url Flash websites, only with less Flash and more javascript (hey - web twopointoh, hell yeah! Wooo wooooo!). So yeah, good luck to you disabling them on anything more elaborate than Wikipedia...
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That's very pertinent.
I certainly wouldn't read The Register if I had to suffer the adverts full time. I turn them on occasionally to see if things have improved, but they're just too distracting.
Would I pay for it? Well, it's OK journalism for "free", but I'd want something a bit different if it was actually costing me money.
That's the other side of the problem - publishers tune their content for the freetard audience and there's constant competition to deliver essentially the same information to the same people with increasingly thin margins.
We're not going to get the content we would pay for under the "free" model, regardless of how much advertising we consume. On the other hand, we would willingly pay for only a tiny fraction of the content we consume. That's tough for both publishers and advertisers, but frankly that's their problem: there are plenty of things to do in life other than sit in front of a computer screen.
@Warm Braw
"That's tough for both publishers and advertisers, but frankly that's their problem"
Unless it impacts the content produced (full disclosure: 0% domain allowed ad-blocker here).
"there are plenty of things to do in life other than sit in front of a computer screen"
Yes, there's at least two other types of screen via which we can consume critical information!!! (full disclosure: I extremely rarely use either). Paper is cool though, I guess.
An ad blocker that allows some ads through. The definition of what constitutes an acceptable ad is what caused the problem in the first place. If ads were less inappropriate, less intrusive and less of a strain on users’ resources, they wouldn’t have pissed everyone enough to develop and install ad blockers in the first place.
I’m also a convert to uBlock Origin, and I can see that the philosophical underpinnings AdBlock Plus are clearly up for grabs.
Sorry Register. I love your site, and I know you need the cash, and I’m even willing to pay for a subscription, but ad networks are a total pain in the delicate regions.
Exactly. And there seem to be some native, built-in feedback mechanisms that converge towards the large players managing to tacitly arrive at much the same customer-screwing conditions even without overt collusion: take it or leave it, except there's no-one else to go to - they all do the same shitty stuff. Also, anyone trying to counter that with "that's an opportunity for someone else to do it better and steal the establishment's business" needs to wake the f### up and realize that the first thing players in any mature industry do is close the door behind them, lock it and weld it shut - to make sure barriers to entry prevent anyone from doing just that.
OR Eyeo could maybe, say, make deals with its USERS, whereby, if the people who REALLY, REALLY, REALLY want us to see their grotty "content" AND waste precious bandwidth with ads, then they could beg us, grovel on their digital knees, to be allowed to sully OUR marvellous Unicorn powered Interwebz briefly with their common shekel-grubbing Marketeering. If we deign to be generous, then we shall. Piffle!
Won't work. Our metadata is worth more to the ad agencies than the average Net user is willing to pay. Ad agencies thus outbid us every time. Bet pretty soon most of the Internet will be locked behind ad walls, and the decision will come whether or not to go "autistic" and abandon the Internet.
I recently found that ABP was even explicitly allowing some video adverts - with audio to boot. Scared the living daylights out of me.
So goodbye. You do not get to do that ABP, you are now dead.
I sent you the complaint so maybe you'll change that before everyone leaves, but goodbye.
Simple as unchecking a box, yes (unless they changed it since I stopped using it). They introduced that "acceptable ads" feature while I was still using Adblock Plus, and it didn't bother me-- I just disabled it, and it went back to being a full adblocker. I switched to uBlock Origin because it is smaller, faster, and lighter. ABP used to increase the memory consumption of FF compared to loading the same pages with no blocker; uBO reduced it. There have been changes to FF since then that were said to greatly reduce ABP's memory consumption, but I don't see any reason to go back and compare.
Instead of filling websites with a shit load of crappy javascript, flash, animated gifs and webm's so that I need an addon to filter it all out and only show the "respectable" adverts, just get rid of everything but the respectable adverts? Content producers will still get paid, and everyone else will save a metric fuck-ton of effort.
Whilst I'm ranting. I don't know what new click detection / user tracking script you've installed here at el Reg but it's seriously fucking up Chrome on Android. Random page freezes and only ever on this site. Started about a week ago.
Not gonna work. Just the other day I went to the effort of explicitly removing a specific DIV frame from a certain website's layout (which wasn't even blocked by Ad-block) simply because I don't go to read tech news (or whatever I do at that site, already forgot which one it was) just to be repeatedly presented with perfectly legit, non-animated and silent images of bare feet in excruciating waves of hot, colourful pain that could oh-so-easily be averted simply by using XYZ medicinal compound (oh hi there Lily the Pink).
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Yep. Long-time user of ABP - previously had acceptable ads turned on (I'm not a *total* freetard) but ABP's idea of 'acceptable' and mine clearly differ and thanks to this article I'm now running uBlock Origin instead (plus hosts and Ghostery which I still send anonymized data with 'cause I do believe in supporting developers). Good job Eyeo - enjoy your short-term profits before the rats abandon the ship.
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Minimum acceptable advertising standards
(1) Absolutely no tracking in any way, no exception.
(2) Absolutely no autoplay videos of any kind except when I press play on a video or when I click on a link for a video (and not a link for a story).
(3) Absolutely no ads that cover part or all of a website.
(4) Absolutely no ads that try to use my location. No "Shocking secret [city name] man discovers!"
(5) Absolutely no ads that use Flash, Java, or Javascript. No exception.
(6) Advertisers are soley responsible for vetting their ads. If an ad injects or attempts to inject malware, the entity placing the ad and the carrrier jointly and severally indemnify me from all costs in diagnosing and repairing, including but not limited to the restoration of any data that is lost. Browser helpers and toolbars are defined as malware.
(7) No ads for things I never buy.
(8) No ads for things I already own. (Amazon!! WTF?)
(9) No ads for things I will *never* own (take a guess, it will be 99.9999% of what you peddle).
(10) You want to run an ad? You pay for any metered data.
There. I think that about covers it
I agree with most of what you say here, but there's one small logical problem: 1) and 7), 8), 9) are mutually exclusive. If the ad splaffers can't track you, how are they supposed to know what you'll never buy or already own?
I'd demand 1) as a base-level requirement myself, but that means that I can't complain if I start seeing ads for lipstick or baby food, neither of which I have any use for. In fact, seeing such ads would form some small assurance that I wasn't being tracked.
But aside from that, your 1) - 6) and 10) I'm right with you on.
1-5 look like they might be objectively enforceable. 6 is redundant if you've blocked all forms of active content under 5. 7-9 look subjective so whilst I sympathise with the sentiment I don't think you'll be able to write code that achieves it. 10 seems a bit "meh" if you have reduced ads to the level of small images by judicious enforcement of 1-5.
But 1-5? Definitely!
far too many sites require 'googleapis' to be allowed through to even get the home page to work.
I really have no idea what crap it spreads on my system.
Pretty soon, ALL my browsing will be done from within a VM that gets restored every day with a clean image. Then F---You advertisers. I will never ever buy anything from Adverts served to me over the TV, Radio or via my browser. Got it?
Yours, a decidely grumpy old man at 06:40 in the morning and only 1 mug of coffee consumed so far.
Add Block Plus needs to give up trying to reform the ad industry.
The internet Add industry is fraudulent, corrupt and bent from top to to bottom almost no significant ad money trickles down to true content creators. Its all defrauded, aggregated or middlemened out. I hate to fall back on the Nazi analogy, but if add block plus waves a piece of paper and says "peace in our time" don't buy it.
I am seriously thinking of getting involved in the industry, never in the field of human endeavor has so much money been stolen at so little risk.
Of course it is. Considering the logical conclusion that the only way to avoid blocking of ads at _some_ level is to own and wall-off the entire computing chain from browser to computer to monitor, cue HDMI DRM focus shift from "not allowed to steal content" to "not allowed to not watch all these commercials" in 3... 2... 1...
Disable updates and import custom blocklists. Done and done.
This is alot like a backdoor for encryption. If there's a way around my defenses, malware writers will find it and exploit it.
I'll probably join the rest of you and jump ship once it becomes too much of a hassle.
To quote Val Kilmer from Real Genius, "There are a lot of generic brands out there that are just as tasty as the real thing."
It's My Computer.
How could it possibly be Illegal for me to deny an Advertiser the opportunity to use MY CPU and My processing cycles to force me to watch an Ad that I have no interest in watching?
If the Website has a problem with me blocking the ads, they have the option of denying me access to their site. I have no problem with that. If their content isn't truly "Free", that is Their choice. They have available to them the option of dumping the ads in favor of a Subscription Fee for Ad Free Content. If their Content is truly compelling, people will be willing to Pay. Unless their subscription is too expensive, then the Market will respond by Ignoring them.
I agree with the people who say the Advertising is Ruining the web.
I first installed an Ad Blocker because I experienced Major Slowdowns and saw my browser displaying messages that told me it was WAITING for web sites with names containing the word "AD" that took minutes to respond.
After I installed the Ad Blocker, I took the time to Block any site that spent enough time Waiting that I could read & remember the name of the site it was Waiting For and add it to the blocker's list.
My Browsing has been very much Improved by this.
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