Ad Blocking Will Keep Growing Until We Make Ads Better

The issue not mentioned is better curating of ads. The #2 reason to block ads right now (after not making 20 connections and running half a meg of javascript that slows down your browser) is security. Malware distributors are abusing ad networks to distribute exploits. The ad networks need to do a better job keeping out the bad actors. This also ties to the privacy and spam issues as advertisers who can be trusted not to deliver malware can probably also be trusted to obey DNT and unsubscribe requests.

Speaking of spam, advertisers should adopt opt-in policies and avoid confusing "gotcha" phrasing. Things like having a large "Download" button that goes to the paid signup page, while the actual file download link is a tiny plain text link you have to scroll down to find. Stop that. It's deceptive and if done in a physical store would get you sued for fraud.

Except I really don't expect advertisers to do any of these things because they're not interested in making the viewer happy, they want to make their customers happy and that means getting as many people to "accidentally" click on their ads as possible. I'm sure they've done AB testing and heatmaps that prove playing nice is not profitable.

Good steps -- a site that asks me to allow displaying of ads will get white-listed as long as they play by the guidelines that they've laid out here.

It is promising to see the industry look at ways to self-regulate before something drastic happens. i.e. doomed government attempts to regulate, or more sophisticated ad-blocking that continues to destroy the business model.

I wrote this piece so happy to answer any questions - also love to hear any suggestions or thoughts from people running ad block.

I run an ad blocker on all my browsers except IE (which I generally don't use unless a site like Fandango has made it impossible to finish a transaction while using Disconnect/uBlock, in which case half the time I'll just abandon the site and go to a different vendor). I make a habit of whitelisting sites that I find valuable and don't engage in sketchy advertising practices. I even pay for Newsblur as my RSS reader so that I can pull the actual page up in the viewer and allow for the site to get my clicks. The rules laid out in TFA would go a long way to easing my blocking even further, and when I used Ad Blocker I enabled the acceptable ads list. In the past few years, though, I've also started to see advertising networks as potential malware threats and think advertising standards should incorporate security standards, as well. When I go to a page that NoScript shows has 30 or 40 scripts with unrecognizable names, I'm less likely to go back to the site at all, much less whitelist any of the blocked domains. If I was running an enterprise IT department, I'd be more likely to blacklist advertising domains than timewaster sites because of the threat of malicious payloads through those advertising networks.

TFA lays out ways to make advertising more humane for viewers, but I am curious how aware or involved with technical approaches like VRM or Kantara Initiative's User-Managed Access (UMA) to making permission-based advertising more feasible. In the past year I bought two new high ticket items--a new car and a new laptop. I had to do two phase of research for each of them--what is even out there as far as features and then who offers the features I think are interesting. I would expect that a highly qualified lead would have made any advertising much more lucrative during either of those phases (advertising that I would have actually welcomed) than a bunch of simple broadcast ad views (which I mostly blocked anyway). I would love to see advertisers and browser developers work with groups like those to make advertising not just less obnoxious but something that I could actively consider useful.

not so sure abt this. even if some adblockers eventually whitelist "good advertisers", there will always be blockers that block everything. and ads are just half of the story. there are tons of trackers and marketing javascripts clogging down the web.

it seems to me that once people see the benefits of the blockers, there's almost no chance of getting them to go back