To the pro-advertisers reading this, I feel your pain. I have long standing clients who depend on ad revenue, such as print publications that early on successfully transition to the web, who are now really struggling.
However, I aggressively use ad blockers. Here is why:
* the majority of the ads I see on the Internet are of the sort that I use to find in the back of magazines. Crap I would never read is now force feed to me front and center
* nearly every single web page is OVERLOADED with ads. Take a look at a print copy of the New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, etc. Feature articles often have few or even NO ads. In fact, feature articles often start with two pages of JUST content.
* the way the ads work often kills my battery life. NOT COOL. You have no right to kill my battery life.
* You track us with no way to really opt out with out using ad blockers.
* You use the tracking info to target people. Including targeting children and at-risk (mentally impaired) adults. It is very different to have a scam artist with a small ad in the back of a magazine, compared to a phishing web ad that is trying to take advantage of an elderly grandma whose bank account is a click away.
* you burn my bandwidth. this is bad on WiFi, evil on cell data. You have no right to rack up cellular charges on my behalf.
* I don't trust the Kirby vacuum sales person in my home, I don't trust your javascript laden ads on my computer.
While I blanket block ads on the Internet, I do allow ads on sites that only use simple graphics and text for ads. And who demonstrate that they respect me as a reader and potential client.
edit: clarified I was referring to the "print" editions of the New Yorker & SI
The worst for me is when I open something on my phone and start reading and a huge ad appears and takes up my whole screen telling me to put in my email to subscribe to the website. Then I have to scroll around to find the little X to close it. It's maddening.
Only slightly less worse is the same thing happening on my laptop after I have had a few seconds to start reading the first paragraph, then the whole page dims and a full-page ad appears.
Adblock gets rid of this stuff and it's why I use it and will continue to do so in the future, but I do leave the whitelist on for unobtrusive advertising.
I just wish AdBlocker could get rid of that awful Forbes "Thought of the Day" page that always opens. Unfortunately the best it can do it get rid of the ad on that page, but still annoying.
I forgot to add, I have had healthcare providers, attorneys and other professionals with legal obligations to maintain client privacy ask how they can do this on the web.
I have to advise them to use ad blockers as part of their privacy tools.
I've never used an ad blocker and I feel like you are over-exaggerating each of these points. I'm guessing I'll be in the minority on HN though. What kind of sites do you visit that have all these terrible ads? I don't even think porn sites, which have notoriously bad ads, are even that bad.
* the over the top clutter of ads on many sites is a really problem. I try to avoid such sites, but it is not always possible.
* I have been on the Internet since 1991. I am expecting to be on it for another 30 or more years. I am weighing a life time of risk, not a single page visit.
This last point is key. One bad actor, using one Zero Day exploit could cause a huge amount of personal pain for me. As a web developer for 20 years, I learned long ago to do everything in my power to prepare and to the extent possible prevent being hit by a Zero Day.
You may feel differently, but I personally see huge risk over the course of a lifetime.
The main thing for me isn't even blocking ads as such. The main thing is blocking the absurd amount of crappy javascript that clogs up my browser, in which I have no interest.
I find the unfiltered web insufferable these days.
I used to love Ghostery, until I learned that their business model is to resell your browsing habits and profile back to advertisers.
If you want a suggestion for an alternative, I really don't have one. I'm currently using µBlock, which isn't bad, but requires a bit more setup than Ghostery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock
>until I learned that their business model is to resell your browsing habits and profile back to advertisers.
...If you voluntarily opt into that program (Ghostrank), after reading the straight-forward description.
I don't understand why people find their business model so abhorrent when its entirely opt-in and they don't weasel around what ghostrank does. Surely you must find every service on the internet that you use for free, particularly Google, to be horrible as well?
I also use µBlock. It made me realize what a huge crapload of JavaScript the websites include. On most sites, you can have like 70% of the external-domain content blocked and the site keeps working as intended. Hackernews is beautiful in that regard, literally just stuff from ycombinator.com and news.ycombinator.com. I love this simplicity.
disconnect.me is an alternative. That in combination with a hosts file works very well for me; especially because it uses much less memory compared to adblock.
I don't read German, but I believe the main complaint in the case was AdBlock Plus charging money as part of its ad "whitelisting" service. ABP said it was to cover the cost of verifying the ads are safe and responsible. Publishers called it extortion (e.g. pay us this money if you want your ad impressions back).
IMO, if I downloaded something that is supposed to block the ads, I don't want the damn ads. I've not used ABP in a while but I'd be pretty pissed if it started loading ads again just because the people had paid for it. They had to figure out some way to make money, though, I guess.
You can uncheck the "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" line on AdBlock. I don't mind some ads as I know people need to make money and I'll click if it's compelling. Just hate the large gif ads.
I think you are asked upon installation whether you want to allow whitelisted ads (this was how it worked the last time I used Adblock, anyway; I use uBlock now). Some users want this because they see viewing ads as a way to support the "free" websites they use.
Copying from that page, the rules for ads to not be blocked include:
1. Static advertisements only (no animations, sounds or similar)
2. Preferably text only, no attention-grabbing images
Ad placement:
a. Ads should never obscure page content (e.g. require users to click a button to close the ad before viewing the page).
b. For pages featuring a reading text ads should not be placed in the middle, where they interrupt the reading flow. However, they can be placed above the text content, below it or on the sides. The same applies to search results pages: paid search results cannot be mixed with organic results.
c. When ads are placed above the content of a main page, they should not require the user to scroll down. The available vertical space is likely to be at least 700 pixels. Advertising should not occupy more than one-third of that height. Paid search results on search pages are allowed to occupy more space, but they should never outnumber organic results.
d. When placed on the side ads should leave enough space for the main content. The available horizontal space can be expected to be at least 1000 pixels, and advertising should not occupy more than a third of that width.
3. Advertising should be clearly marked as such with the word "advertising" or its equivalent, and it should be distinguishable from page content, for instance via a border and/or different a background color.
4. Marking and placement requirements do not apply for hyperlinks with affiliate referrer IDs embedded in the content of the page. Additional criteria for hyperlinks with affiliate referrer IDs:
a. Redirects originating from the hyperlink should not present any other webpage than the destination page.
b. In texts, not more than 2 percent of the words can be hyperlinked for monetization purposes.
c. Hyperlinks should not be formatted or behave differently than other links.
d. Hyperlinks should not be misleading, in either content or placement.
Personally, I never want to see ads, and I've always blocked all ads. But I can empathize with the people who are fine with seeing this kind of ad.
How do you feel about disabling javascript by default, and making things click-to-play? I ask because I think the line between "advert used for site finance," and "drive-by malware" can sometimes be blurry.
I think that when I click on a link I agree to see the content they provide. I'm not sure I really want to agree to third-party stuff without knowing what it is - and I'm very sure I don't want to start loading third party scripts automatically.
Fair enough, but if your browser is susceptible to drive-by malware, you're going to have a bad time on the internet whether you block ads or not. I think hacked sites are a far more common malware vector than ads.
That's a bit of a strawman, isn't it? No one is saying their ad blocker is their "only" protection. But when you go to to an ad-infested site like huffington post, with dozens of different ad sources on each page, an ad blocker can cut your exposure to a small fraction of what it would be otherwise.
It's not that simple. Except for the simplest ones that might just be an image, ads are not just ads like in magazines and on TV.
Ads use your resources to download more content. They use your resources for animation and sound.
They also track you.
Content providers are free to not serve you content if they detect ad blockers. If they have trouble detecting ad blockers, they are free to not be in business.
They are free to move to a subscription model.
They are operating willingly on the current open web. It's not your problem.
I don't use AdBlock Plus but i do use AdBlock. I think its my decision to choose which ads i watch and which i don't. It's not stealing, Webmasters can detect if someone is using AdBlock or not.
Perfectly acceptable. I believe it's within everyone's right to filter what hits their browser (and what their browser gets in the first place) as much as it is the website's right to serve whomever they want.
They should attempt to use technical means, though, as it's unlikely that a simple 'Do you use adblock?' prompt is going to work very well.
As I noted elsewhere in this thread, I whitelisted Reddit when they noticed my ad blocker and they politely asked me to think about it. It can be done. One solution among probably many.
Their website, their right, their choice. Of course, people protesting/boycotting/etc. those who block people who block ads is also their right and their choice.
> So what's your view on sites blocking people with AdBlock?
It's the web equivalent of an a entitled-feeling child throwing a tantrum.
People who use ad-blocking software, and temporarily disable it on your page just to view the content, are not going to click on the ads.
Furthermore, if you take additional measures to make them click on the ads ("please visit our sponsor first"), that constitutes click fraud. Users who click on an ad just to view the content are not interested in what is being advertized at all, and will not convert to buyers.
Morally, it is within a hair's breadth of sending Javascript to the user's browser which simulates that user clicking on the ad (so that it looks like a real visit, as the ad syndicate knows), which would be blatant click fraud.
It's actually not easy to detect adblock use. Popular ad blockers actively try to evade detection. If the intent is to let publishers decide whether to allow adblock users or not, it should send an easily detectable flag.
Put a div tag with a class of "ad" on it... then test it's display style property 100ms after the load event...
For that matter, wrap your primary content in a div with a class of "ad" ... then users won't even see the content, and you can replace it with a notice to disable adblock and refresh the page.
Funny, I had no problem detecting this on a site with several million unique visitors a month... Of course I did the detection against my actual ad tags in the page...
Wouldn't you be getting false positives from ads that are simply slow to load and false negatives from ad blockers that hide ads without using the "display" property?
It wouldn't control anything on your machine. It allows the web site to control whether they send content to you or not.
I use AB Edge. I've visited Reddit, they posted a "we notice you use an ad blocker, if you like us, please think about whitelisting us." They could have just refused to serve the content. Either way would have been acceptable; it's my browser and I control what I see, it's their content and they control where it goes.
In that case I whitelisted Reddit. Nothing on Reddit remote-controlled my machine, it just initiated a brief "conversation."
>> It's not stealing, Webmasters can detect if someone is using AdBlock or not.
In other words it's not stealing unless you get caught?
Edit: Relax people. Let's not get into another debate on copying vs. theft. I was merely pointing out that the parents analogy (which was the one that referenced stealing) was bad.
Is Google stealing from them when they crawl their pages but don't load in the ads? What about when I wget their page? Am I stealing from them now? Maybe when I disable javascript in my browser? Am I now a thief?
No, I am not. It's not stealing whatsoever, ever. Even if they detect you're not loading in all the content they want you to load. If they manage to detect this, then they can choose to block your access to the content. Or perhaps rework their revenue model if it turns out it isn't working.
Not the op but, I often disable adblock on sites I enjoy because I feel similarly. I'm not really interested in a semantic debate about what is or is not "stealing," but it certainly deprives others of revenue for creating content I get value from. When that content is otherwise free except for ads, it makes me feel rather shitty to go out of my way to block their revenue stream.
Edit: that said, I do still keep adblock on for sites with rather abusive or obnoxious ads.
Virtually every ad is abusive or obnoxious, because they track you. That's probably the leverage that makes online ads worthwhile. That's for better targeted ads, what could be wrong with that (unless maybe you see an ad for sex toys while you're looking at a site with your kid, oops). But data about you can be misused, or stolen and misused, and it's better in general to just not let the data be collected; you don't really know what they're doing with it.
Interesting observation: ad networks collect data about us, they can clearly identify us as individuals (which is why you see those sex toy ads after visiting a sex toy site, for hypothetical example). But there was never a privacy statement involved.
We're obviously going to have different definitions of abusive and obnoxious, but for the record I don't find tracking that I visited a website to fall under that category. I was speaking more for pop ups and things that play video or music.
And as I said, adblock has it's uses. If you don't want your kids to see ads for sex toys, nothing wrong with using adblock when visiting those types of sites.
>In other words it's not stealing unless you get caught?
Not comparable. Try: In other words, it's not stealing when you don't donate to a street performer, especially one who gets in your way and impedes normal use of the street (like auto play videos with sound).
Is jumping a subway turnstile stealing? The same train leaves whether you're on it or not. But if enough people don't pay the fare, the whole system breaks down.
This is more like watching the trains come and go, from outside of the station, but ignoring the ads which are painted on the train.
Speaking of looking at printed ads, imagine you had a car which, instead of a windshield, had a high resolution camera and a display. This display would contain image processing which identifies billboards and blackens them out, while leaving traffic signs intact.
Would that be stealing?
Basically, the argument is that not looking at something is stealing.
Where does it stop? What if you're looking, but not processing it congnitively? That must be, in Orwellian terms, a "thought crime": you're looking at the ad, but staring blankly, and its semantics isn't sinking in; you're not allowing the ad to turn into meaning in your mind make you want the product.
I think jumping a turnstile is self-evidently stealing. It is also the case that it becomes a problem for everyone when enough people do it, but it would be stealing either way.
This is some ridiculous pedantry. Theft is a synonym for stealing. Merriam Webster even defines it as the "act of stealing." So if you're going to use "theft of service" as an acceptable phrase, then "stealing a service" must also work conceptually. To complain that is unacceptable to shorten that to just stealing in a conversation is utterly ludicrous.
There is no theft of service until you take a train to another station, and then jump the gates there to exit.
If you want to get around the gates to enter a station without a ticket, you can just ask the staff. I've done it a couple of times in Japan. You can get inside to look for a lost item or whatever. They even let people in to access the station shops. I watched one tourist ask for that and be granted.
Also, one time I entered a station without swiping my Suica card through the machine. I explained that at the destination station and where I had boarded; they cheerfully fixed it up and let me exit. There is room for mistakes without being automatically branded a thief just for being there.
I get the point you're trying to make, but in this case it's me who is paying for the train to move, in the form of internet connection & electricity bills
To quote an old saying, "Nothing in life is free."
Websites rely on ad revenue. If the ads are blocked the website or streamers on Twitch do not receive the revenue. Just because it doesn't go into my pocket doesn't mean it isn't stealing in my own personal view.
For example if you take a sapphire from the Museum of Natural History and than throw away or lose the golf ball size 563 carat Star of India. You gained nothing from taking it but you still are guilty of stealing a diamond.
PS I am extremely conservative in my person morals. I am also fairly liberal in my view of society (At least that is what my Tea Party Inlaws and Libertarian friends say)
>Websites rely on ad revenue. If the ads are blocked the website or streamers on Twitch do not receive the revenue.
And I'm perfectly happy with that.
It is not my responsibility to download webpages in such a way as to maximise the revenue of the site owner.
It is the business' responsibility to make money. Not mine. If they are employing ineffective methods then it is up to them to alter them. It is not up to me to change my behaviour to suit their business plan.
I am perfectly within my rights to download web pages using whatever software I like, whether that be lynx, wget, curl, a screen-reader, or Firefox with add-ons or Firefox with javascript or images or widgets or cookies blocked. I use the software that suits me. I am under no obligation - legal or moral - to use the software that suits companies serving websites.
If the advertising is so appallingly bad that 100% of people are blocking it, then it doesn't deserve to exist, does it?
The idea of advertising is to get people interested in some product or service; not to provide an income stream for websites that can't persuade users to pay for their content.
I had no idea ABP accepted money from advertisers to be put on their whitelist. I know they have to make money somehow but this just seems suspiciously like extortion to me.
No it isn't, because no payment is required to view the page in question.
How it works is that your browser downloads a page. That page contains scripts and links. Thanks to blocking software working on your behalf, the browser picks and chooses what of that cruft it should activate and what it should ignore.
Nobody has a right to make your computer fetch unwanted content and throw it in your face.
It's like looking at a tray of hors d'oeuvres, and choosing a few that you like, avoiding ones you don't find palatable.
Anyway, not long ago, I obtained a full refund for a bag of apples that were rotten, even though I ate some of it. That is normal.
There is no fucking "implicit agreement" when you look at a publicly available website, any more than when you look at a billboard on the street. I'm sorry for cussing, but no one gets to dictate the manner in which you use your eyes in public spaces.
Only if the store sold Apples under the expectation that everyone could eat their Apples first before paying and genetically modified the Apples to have hidden rotten parts.
You can disable that white list of "unobtrusive advertising" by unchecking a single tick box.
I use it because it works and has worked for a long time. I tried µBlock but it was leading to weird short lockups of my Firefox after a longer session.
Adblockers are not that popular yet, but each time I show adblock and co to someone, that persons just doesn't go back and recommends adblock and co to his family,friends and coworkers. The rise of adblocking solutions WILL be exponential, the heck now some businesses make all their browsers block ads.. It's today that advertisers or sites relying on ad revenue need to find solutions.
One could bare people using adblockers from seeing content("free" pornsites are starting doing that). but then it will just be an escalation in technology. Adblockers will become smarter and ultimately defeat detection techniques.
One can appeal to user's "conscience" by displaying a message stating one relies on ad revenue. I think it's a good compromise if one promises that his ads are discrete like simple pictures or text.
Frankly, years of ad abuse, loud auto-play video ads and flash ads that take over the whole window have made users weary of online advertising.
>heck now some businesses make all their browsers block ads
As one such business (a school) which blocks ads on company computers, I can say it has drastically reduced our malware-related incidents from teachers/staff. My gut feeling is that search result ads and false download buttons were the source of many of our infections. Users do not think before they click, and it seems like most of them that expect to be able to find useful software behind an advertisement often pay a price.
Maybe OT, but does anyone have decent estimates for what percentage of users are blocking ads?
Would also be interesting to know percentage vs browser.
The BBC is weird. In the UK (bbc.co.uk) there are no ads as it's paid for by the license fee but abroad (bbc.com) there are ads as it's a different (commercial) entity.
It's also worth noting that, you can't view BBC worldwide content from within the UK either due to regional restrictions. I've heard this is due to the BBC policy forbidding them showing adverts to UK users, yet it's content regularly not freely accessible (without adverts) to UK users either, as its a separate entity.
There's been several occasions that BBC worldwide has had articles that I've been unable to read, or find on the standard BBC news website.
This is sad day for content creators. If the site is full of ads you are not comfortable to view do NOT VISIT such sites again. It's stealing, it's manipulating the statistics.
We can't get good content because corporations taught people to not pay for content and now we will not get good content because people will slice the income of those who use ads.
While I would agree with this line of thought, ad networks have been used for the spread of malware and various scams. Ad networks have also tracked the browsing habits of users, with little regard for our privacy.
It's easy to say that if the site is full of ads, I should not visit it again, however I also do not want to load pieces of Javascript doing the above by mistakenly visiting a website that I do not want to visit. This isn't just an issue of annoyance, but one of online safety as well. I now recommend to every friend I have to use ad blockers.
Therefore I cannot sympathize much with networks complaining or with creators complaining about ad blockers. They've brought this on themselves and unless they change their ways, ad blockers will get more and more popular.
Its not just that they bungled it. Its a question of who owns my computer. I do, so I get to say what is displayed and what code is run. So clipping out the ads is entirely my own business, done in my own home on my own devices.
No, I can't possibly agree with the line of thought of the parent comment. Its self-serving nonsense.
On a fundamental level,
your server is free to do whatever it wants with the requests I send it, and my browser is free to do whatever I want with the responses it receives.
Because your server is yours, and my computer is mine.
Is it easy to detect people who are using adblock and serve them nothing? Not that that is the best way to handle it but the OP does have a point. At least it would stop leaches. If you put content out for "free" because you make a few cents from advertising if they block the ads it's not much different than stealing.
I have never done this, but technically you could do this. The problem I see how to implement this in a way that can not easily be countered with new ad blocking tools.
For example, a year or so ago I saw that DuckDuckGo notices when you use ad blocking and very respectfully asks you to consider not blocking their ads.
A few months later, the ad blocking software that I use, added a feature to block those respectful messages too.
Ad blockers should develop a way for sites to know if a user is using the ad blocker. It's not about advertisers winning it's about people that pay for hosting with the expectation they will make ad revenue from their content. I feel like ad blockers is pushing us towards the "comcast pay per channel" type internet.
The fact is a majority of sites need to make money from their content. So they can sell ads, or related products, or paid access or just beg like wikipedia but there has to be some potential to make money or a majority of sites cease to exist.
Do you switch channels on your TV when the commercials start and switch back when the show resumes? Blocking online ads is basically the same. i.e. perfectly legitimate.
Only you hurt the creator more online, since the advertisers can now measure the views+clicks. Which is also perfectly fair - They should not have to pay for ads nobody sees. This would also be fair on TV - But there it's impossible to measure.
First of all I do not watch TV. I assume that's why netflix is so popular. Please pardon me i am not sure if it has an ads in it or not but i assumed since it's a content on demand it does not.
Also simply blocking something because you can but you should not is cheating.
Cheating? How is it that controlling what my software, running in my hardware, running on my power does or does not do is cheating? Should I not have control over what's mine?
If a website finds that their business model became unsuited for modern times, it's their responsibility to change it, not mine.
How about, if you really want to deliver ads, then sell first party ads delivered from your own servers with the content... nobody is stopping that, and unless you use css classes like "ad" or JavaScript to deliver said ads, then it likely won't get blocked.
I worked on an SPA website a few years ago that used a time-based billing model for advertising, The three adslots for the given user session were for the same advertiser, this required locally delivered ads, and a JS/http ping to establish between min and max display time recording... It worked fine, and even got through the ad blockers.
There's no reason a publisher cannot do the same. Just like there's no reason a random website I visit should force me to download questionable content from third parties unknown to even the publisher.
Yes, but you might discover that your content is not valuable.
People are willing to pay for content that is valuable. LWN [1] and the No Agenda Show [2] prove that you don't need ads to produce content that is leagues beyond any ad-supported content.
The underlying reason most newspapers are dying is because they aren't doing anything but regergitating the Associated Press and Reuters. There's no difference between a thoughtful, well investigated new article, and one that's a rehash of the Associated Press or Reuters. Why go through all the work of confirming with credible sources, looking through documents, and interviewing experts when you can get the same number of page views from a syndicated article.
I got lost. Your content is not valueable, ok plausible. Then, newspapers are dying because they only show (valuable) articles?
I think rather, its not the value of the information that's at issue. Its the monopoly on the source that's valuable. Once the monopoly is gone, once you can get the same stuff for free somewhere else, then nobody pays.
I think if you remove the ads on your website and put up a donations/patreon link you may be pleasantly surprised that nobody feels that your content is worth paying for.
Definitely. Content blocked by Adblock is always top notch stuff nobody in his right mind would be able to live without. I know for sure; I create a lot of those amazing wonders during my workday.
However, I aggressively use ad blockers. Here is why:
* the majority of the ads I see on the Internet are of the sort that I use to find in the back of magazines. Crap I would never read is now force feed to me front and center
* nearly every single web page is OVERLOADED with ads. Take a look at a print copy of the New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, etc. Feature articles often have few or even NO ads. In fact, feature articles often start with two pages of JUST content.
* the way the ads work often kills my battery life. NOT COOL. You have no right to kill my battery life.
* You track us with no way to really opt out with out using ad blockers.
* You use the tracking info to target people. Including targeting children and at-risk (mentally impaired) adults. It is very different to have a scam artist with a small ad in the back of a magazine, compared to a phishing web ad that is trying to take advantage of an elderly grandma whose bank account is a click away.
* you burn my bandwidth. this is bad on WiFi, evil on cell data. You have no right to rack up cellular charges on my behalf.
* I don't trust the Kirby vacuum sales person in my home, I don't trust your javascript laden ads on my computer.
While I blanket block ads on the Internet, I do allow ads on sites that only use simple graphics and text for ads. And who demonstrate that they respect me as a reader and potential client.
edit: clarified I was referring to the "print" editions of the New Yorker & SI