Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love

I've no real objections to advertising online, so for a long time I didn't use an ad blocker. However, in the last two or three years some adverts on sites which I visit often have been becoming increasingly offensive. Flashing animated images, pictures of the inside of people's mouths, and semi-pornographic ads are something which degrades my web viewing experience and if a technical solution to this problem exists then I have no hesitation about using it. For the foreseeable future it seems that ad blocking will remain necessary.

Perhaps the solution is some sort of code of conduct for advertisers. If ads are discreet and respectful of the viewer then I'd certainly be prepared to stop blocking them.

Host your own ads, that way they won't be in my ad-blocker's blacklist. If your adds become annoying, then they go in the blacklist.

I'm wondering if, between ad-blocking and tivo, separate ads and commercials will be going away soon. I'm perfectly OK with the judges of American Idol with Coke glasses on their desk, or a sentence at the bottom of a blog post: "This post brought to you by FizzBuzz.com". I also don't mind the ads at the front of some podcasts, spoken by the same people that narrate the podcast itself. http://ruby5.envylabs.com/ is a good example of advertising that I don't mind one bit. Similar to how old radio shows were "sponsored", and the sponsor got a mention a few times throughout the show.

When it comes to ads online, though, isn't the right cliché "the cat's out of the bag?" For years before ad-blocking became widespread, the more tech-savvy users complained and warned that the more aggressive ads became, what with popups/unders, talking ads, etc., the more likely they would be blocked. (I seem to remember we were poo-pooed by the marketers saying that "real users don't care," though this may be a nerd-chip-on-shoulder revisionist memory.) But, here we are.

It's unfortunate that there's the collateral damage that affects non-obnoxious sites; and, while I whitelist the sites I frequent, and many here may as well, I'm sure we're the minority.

That being said, here's about as close to a real-world analogue for my thoughts as I can get: in NYC, I'm sure there are people in Times Square trying to gain signups for Greenpeace and other "ethical" purposes mixed in with the other people hustling CDs, comedy club tickets, and the like, but I just ignore everyone as I walk by, wholesale, because stopping and seeing what everyone's about will turn a brief walk into a pain in the ass.

I'm not sure what the answer is; perhaps the various adblocking technologies could make whitelisting a site even more obvious? With AdBlock Plus, you hit the drop-down and choose Disable on foobar.com, but it requires an active interaction to seek that out. GlimmerBlocker for the Mac is even more buried (as it's a proxy, it's in System Preferences.) Maybe switching to putting placeholders where the ads would be with a short message and a single click to whitelist would make it a little easier for users to both see how many ads a site's pushing as well as whitelist the site with the minimum amount of effort? I donno.

I'm not sure sympathy is an effective business model. If the ads are annoying enough to make lots of people block them, maybe there's something wrong with the ads, not the people.

The most important thing to sustain an ad-supported business model, above and beyond anything else, is the quality of the ads. Ads that pay well but drive your userbase to block them or leave will no longer pay when the impressions drop, but ads that look nice, aren't intrusive, and are relevant to your audience will keep people coming back.

Look at sites on The Deck's network. They each have one ad, targeted to creative and tech professionals. The ads tend to look more like something the Iconfactory would put together than the average "1 rule 2 a flat belly" dreck. They give both the site and the ad an ethos of premium quality.

Well, if websites stop serving their ads via centralized servers tracking my every move across the web, I might consider not blocking them anymore (provided they're not animated and/or huge).

Know what's worse than online ads? Guilt trips. No Firefox plugin to filter those.

The argument here is that even if the user never would have responded to any of the ads anyway, the website loses money when users don't view the ads. I call bullshit.

An advertiser is going to pay as much for ads as they can profit from them. At the end of the day, the advertiser wants to spend less on ads than they make in profit from running those ads - they don't care about # impressions, # clicks, or whatever. If an advertiser can make $1.01 profit for every 1,000 random ad impressions, they'll pay $1 or less for those 1,000 impressions. If I can identify half my audience that will never respond to the ad, I'm essentially making $1 for 500 impressions instead of 1,000. I'll happily pay $2 for 1,000 of those more effective impressions.

I don't care if you get paid CPM, CPC, or CPA. You aren't making money of the users who don't respond to the ads.

Until recently, I refused to use adblock on principle, because I wanted to support ad-supported websites, even if I didn't like the ads.

Then PDF and flash player exploits started showing up in ads on high-traffic websites. After a couple close calls (only averted thanks to my particular system configuration), I installed AdBlock and FlashBlock. I blacklist both ads and flash content by default.

Websites I can trust to serve me ads that aren't going to try and root my machine get whitelisted so that all their content shows up. All ads based on Project Wonderful fall into this category, since they only serve text and images. Google Ads would have also fallen into this category, but they're not safe anymore since I've seen them serving up Flash.

I'm perfectly happy with sites not liking my approach. They can show me a message asking me to turn off my ad-blocker (and I might, if I'm willing to give them a chance and I'm interested in their content), or refuse to serve me content entirely. That's fine.

If content providers are upset with the current state of things, maybe they should think about how we got here: ad networks are, in general, a wild west in which you serve up unknown advertisements to your visitors without any knowledge of its content. Content providers that care about their customers tend to block any advertisements they get complaints about - which is great - but by using ad networks that run on a 'blacklist only' system, they're knowingly putting their visitors at risk in order to generate ad revenue. By the time a flash exploit makes it onto your advertisement blacklist, your customers have already been hurt.

I think we'll see more of this if adblock usage increases...

  if (user.usingAdBlock()) {
     showMessageTellingThemWhyItsBad();
     ShowDonationOptions();
     offerDegradedExperience();
  }

"Does that mean that there are the occasional intrusive ads, expanding this way and that? Yes, sometimes we have to accept those ads."

Then I'm going to run an ad blocker. I visit how many sites a day? What percent at any given time are in their "sometimes" phase?

You run annoying ads, I get annoyed, I do what I can to stop being annoyed. Don't run annoying ads, I don't get annoyed, I don't take action to avoid the thing that isn't annoying me. Done.

The fact that you picked a business model that relies on me being willing to be annoyed isn't my problem. Stop serving me content if it bothers you so much - I'll survive, I promise.

I have many ad servers blocked at DNS mostly because of cross-domain tracking. Browsers (by default) allow third-party cookies, and while I don't mind if a site runs ads, I do think cross-site tracking and profiling has to be more controllable by users.

The firefox extension "requestpolicy" http://www.requestpolicy.com/ is a fascinating view of the web. It's too strict to use every day, but is much more an "opt-in" view that everyone should try for a day.

I don't actively use AdBlock anymore. I keep it installed just in case I need it but it's usually disabled. Banner/text ads don't bother me. I don't even notice them. Click2Flash is my preferred weapon of choice. I have no guilt blocking Flash ads. They're annoying, invasive, and make my browser slow. Just not willing to make that sacrifice.

"We made the mistake of assuming that everyone who is blocking ads at Ars is doing so with malice."

How'd they do that? Ads are annoying, and many people I know never click on internet ads. For us (perhaps a minority, I don't know) ad-blocking leads to a better internet. We're probably the ones referred to in the article who are happy to help a website out if they ask for it in another way.

On a different note: Maybe car windshields could someday block billboards...

What we need is some sort of voluntary rating system for ads. Tag the massively annoying (sounds, movement etc) or horribly disgusting (rotting teeth etc) ones as such and I'll happily use adblock software that only blocks those. It could kind of work, there'd need to be a way to block adnets/sites that lie about the type of ads of course and... well maybe it wouldn't work but it would be a good start.

But no, I'm not going to disable adblock while there are still so many ads that clearly cross the line of what is aceptable. Sure I feel bad about it but that's just the way it is given that the other options are a) not using the internet or b) constantly seeing pictures of other peoples yellowing teeth.

Advertising is a risk, and always has been. I'm tired of advertisers (and content providers that depend on advertising) trying to shift responsibility to the consumer. If you spend money on a campaign and it delivers results beyond your initial expenditure, then the campaign was successful. There's no guarantee against failure, and it's absolutely certain that the majority of consumers simply won't care about your ads. It's part of the game. Accept it, or look for alternatives.

There seem to be two schools of business; one that tries to beat customers over the head with things, and one that tries to respect the customer as much as possible.

Historically, most web ads seem to have the first view. "Why, of course! All I have to do is treat the visitor like crap: store 75 cookies, throw up new windows, flash some animations, play loud noises, and trick them into clicking on things. Then they'll surely want to shell out cash for my products!"

The problem is, after seeing a few of these, I'm not going to spend time weeding out the good from the bad: it's like junk mail, after awhile it's just thrown away, and it doesn't even matter anymore if there might be a hidden gem.

I can only assume that a scam is being pulled: that there are ad managers who create annoying systems to meet artificial quotas, and then show their employers how many "millions of clicks or page views" they received. That way, they can demand huge sums of money for all the "exposure"; in reality, I'd be surprised if the ads do much good. If a site is "dying", it's not because visitors block ads, it's because companies are falling for the scam and paying advertisers who are essentially being offensive and misleading about their numbers.

Here are examples of effective ads:

- Hulu, because they made reasonable compromises to respect visitors. For example, they have far fewer commercials than an equivalent TV show, and an ad is often displayed "up front" to minimize interruptions later.

- Google, because they make plain text ads that stay out of the way. Not irritating? Good, now I'll actually read it.

Does this mean it's immoral to use Lynx? No Google sponsored links, no images, no flash. Lynx will destroy the Internet!

So Ars Technica has the same fundamental problem as every publisher on earth-- how do you allow your content to reach the most eyes across the most channels and platforms while still maintaing full control (only showing your content with your ads intact).

I'm not sure you can have it both ways. You either have to trade in the open/free variable or accept it and some of the loss of revenue it entails as a tradeoff to the gained visibility.

Just like how Tivo has destroyed the television industry, right? I find it amazing that anyone believes they have a moral obligation to view advertisements.

Relax. Soon everybody will browse from iPads, which do not have ad-block for Safari (that I am aware of).

The perfect platform for paying for stuff: music, software, books and web reading...

Not sure if I am sarcastic or realistic here, you know?!

I don't like ads, and I don't like subscribing. What you need to offer is micropayments. Figure out a way I can pay one cent (maybe 5 or 10, no more) when I like an article and I'll pay you sometimes, and that will be more money than you get showing me ads.

It needs to be something I only set up once, not once per website. It should probably be integrated into my browser so I don't have to find the button on the webpage (and then type in my password or something -- it better be one click).

Of course feel free to continue with ads for the people who don't block them.

You may object that people don't care and won't pay. But the article is saying "please don't block ads as a way to voluntarily pay". If you think sympathy or voluntary payment will work, set this up as a superior option for people to pay with.

Doing sufficiently good micropayments is a lot of work, but there are a hell of a lot of other websites with the same problem Ars has, so either license it to them or get them to help create it.

I practically have to use AdBlock on my N900 just to use some sites. Some flash advertisements are so processor intensive that my phone slows to a crawl.

I'm willing to whitelist them on my ad blocker, I'm not willing to whitelist their ad companies on my javascript filter. I don't trust their ad companies to run arbitrary javascript on my machine.

There's got to be a better way...

Alternate title: "Business Model Based on Ad Views Is Devastating to the Sites You Like."

The notion that I should feel obligated to let someone try to persuade me of something is absurd.

Advertisers, the people who bought the ad, are paying for impressions in the hope of converting them into revenue. An impression spent on me has absolutely zero chance of ever generating any revenue or any other kind of value. This is a safe assumption that has held true in my decade or so of browsing the web. The impressions that I block are spent on someone else, where they have at least the potential to lead to conversions. Thus, I am helping the advertiser make more money.

The ones who lose out in this situation are the middle men: the agencies, networks and content providers. Though their impressions become more valuable, they have less of them to sell and this apparently works out to a loss. However, appealing to my sympathy about this is nonsensical. They are simply asking me to help them sell worthless impressions to some third party. I would never feel inclined to do that, no matter how indebted I felt to the content provider.

Ad supported sites who complain about blocking fail to see the big picture. Their entitled thinking goes no further than "when you do this, I get money, so you should/must do this".

If internet advertising is not sustainable in the face of ad blocking, then it is not sustainable at all.

Incidentally, asking me to actively avoid sites who's ads I don't plan to view is also absurd. The web simply does not, never has, and never could work that way. Nobody can be expected to add that layer of deliberation to the act of clicking on a link. By publishing an unsecured website, you are implicitly authorizing anybody to link to it and to view it in any modified form.

Basically, targeted listings PROVIDES value to viewers. Look at Craigs List. A site should have no problem hosting the ads on their own server and being associated with its advertisers if they respect their readers and what they see.

Content from 3rd party ad servers almost universally does not. They are designed to be as attention-grabbing as possible, stealing the resource of attention from your readers, and SHOULD be blocked.

My idea is a web app that big sites can drop on their servers where advertisers are the users. Advertisers get dynamic quotes from the system based on length coverage etc and demand by other advertisers during the same time, and can upload their ads directly to the sites server. Each site hosts the ads from THEIR web server in the same manner as they do their content images (without javascript) so they should be unblockable.

Basically, it's about giving medium size sites an easy option as possible to host ads directly from their own server. I have a few ideas for peer-to-peer ad sharing between websites as well, if anyone wants to bounce ideas or write some code, dhllndr at gmail, or aim: redfoxbeatbox

I'd use a list in Adblock that whitelisted sites that only ever showed adverts that never moved, never poped up, never used flash, never showed me body parts and never tried to sell me something that was obviously a scam.

Currently that list would effectively be empty I would expect, since the only sites that qualify would have no ads currently

Sounds like there's a market for modified ad blockers that download but don't display the ad---anyone game to try?

Ghostery, NoScript, Adblock Plus, Better Privacy, CustomizeGoogle and ixquick. + privoxy/GlimmerBlocker & http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Those who spy do not call it spying, it is those upon whom the spies spy who rightly call it spying.

Spies call spying a slew of disarming terms: Forensics, investigation, probes, intelligence, surveillance, research, observation, analysis, data gathering, data analysis, data mining, log filing, system testing, polling, questioning, interrogation, looking into, checking, double-checking, reviewing, verification, authentication, testing, evaluation, protection of the customer, the citizen, the nation, and more misleading terms being invented and deployed all the time.

Apologists for spying have an ancient and wide range of justifications for the practice and never admit it is not needed or wanted by the targets of spying. Instead, spies have forever claimed their offense is on behalf of the innocents who do not understand how dangerous the world is.

Now, like any other corporation, they have a product which they sell to a market. The market is advertisers -- that is, other businesses. What keeps the media functioning is not the audience. They make money from their advertisers. And remember, we're talking about the elite media. So they're trying to sell a good product, a product which raises advertising rates. And ask your friends in the advertising industry. That means that they want to adjust their audience to the more elite and affluent audience. That raises advertising rates. So what you have is institutions, corporations, big corporations, that are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses.

Well, what point of view would you expect to come out of this? I mean without any further assumptions, what you'd predict is that what comes out is a picture of the world, a perception of the world, that satisfies the needs and the interests and the perceptions of the sellers, the buyers and the product.

The alternative will be payola. Paid content. If advertising fails as a revenue method, why not sell mentions in the actual content? Why not write articles for pay? It'll happen. I bet it's already happening and in the best cases we can't even suspect a thing..

I guess a good compromise would be to not block the ads but hide them after loading (I think thats how the AdBlock extension for chrome works)?

I agree that educating users is a good plan here. Users should have adblockers active because ads sour our online experience and a large majority of sites show ads that distract from the content (Not to mention that we have lots of sites completely dedicated to spam). On the other hand, if a site has been giving you great content for years, it makes sense to support them. But of course, lots of big tech sites have sponsorship deals so its not like they're posting great content out of their love for us...

Even if the site isn't using a CPM model, getting paid by views, ad impressions still count towards getting better ad deals. For example when dealing with private ad-sales. some people also use ad impressions to count pageviews, for example with Adsense, if you have 3 ad-units on one page, they count as one pageview.

Although, having a huge technical audience who doesn't click any ads will greatly decrease the CTR which will affect the eCPM the publisher is getting paid.

Because of this discussion I decided to unsubscribe (Google Chrome Adblocker https://chrome.google.com/extensions/search?itemlang=&q=...) from both EasyList and Chrome AdBlock custom filters and just custom-block ads that are offensive.

Their 'test' solution sounds like the way to go. If they figured out a decent way to simply bust the whole page for the adblockers they should just go for it.

If I went to a site and it was totally broken due to my blocking the ads I would either a) whitelist it or b) stop going there. Sounds like exactly what they're trying to get users to do.

If you can detect ad blockers, why are you whining? Direct them to an alternative flow/business model that works.

The music and movie industry are having a hard time, too! Soon it will be the newspapers and book publishers. People realise that they don't need publishing companies and soon people will realise that they don't need advertising. But I think that people will always need musicians, actors, and writers.

Compare relevant ads which get submitted to tech news site and discussed...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171648

AdBlock+ white-listing: fine. Flashblock white-listing: no. image.animation_mode: none.

Fixed.

(Edit: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11073 for the cookie-haters among us.)

the people who block ads are never going to click on them anyway, so it's a moot point. it isn't ad blocking that is devastating sites, it's ineffective advertising.

Amen. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

any ad blocker for mobile safari?

I block ads because I'm tethering an iPhone over my eee. My bandwidth cap is 5GB and Im not going to count my quota over ads that I will not click on.

Instead if I want to buy something, I will do a search on products that I want to buy. Then, I will take recommendations.

Sure, there are tons of annoying ads that get in your face and make you want to commit suicide. But there's an easy solution: FlashBlock. Regular ads come through, and ridiculous ads turn into a little box with an activate button.

Personally I use ad-blockers because flash is broken and inevitably will break all modern-browsers at one point or another, especially newspaper sites that seem to think there's no such thing as too much flash.

if only flash was bearable on linux or macs.

It's amazing how upset people get over ads. I wonder how these same anti-ad fanatics deal with other forms of advertising in their day to day life.

If I were Ars or any other site that relied on ad revenue, I probably wouldn't remove any features, but I would put up an atrocious, gigantic, red, flashing banner on the site that was only shown to Adblock users saying, "Please don't use AdBlock! It's hurting us."