Comment by enobrev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by enobrev | Hacker News Reader

I believe it was after reading a discussion here on HN that I began a similar experiment. It's been almost a week and I agree with bitboxer's assessment overall. Most of the ads seem to stay out of the way.

Some are overwhelming or at the very least a bit annoying. The first that pops to mind is space.com - which kept showing a footer ad even though I clicked the "X" - but that's only my immediate example because I'd been to that site more yesterday due to the Mars launch than I have in quite some time.

I noticed that a lot of newpapers seem to have ads that make me want to turn and run away. The full page ads with the "Click to continue" link at the top right. Forbes.com comes to mind immediately. Those ads are repulsive and make me never want to return. And while on the subject, any site that shows a 10 - 15 second video ad before a 15 second video clip will no longer get any of my attention, links, clicks, etc.

If I'm going to continue to try to use the web with ads enabled, I have to draw a line as to what is and isn't acceptable. I haven't tried bitboxer's fork yet, but it sounds like a step in the right direction. To take it further, it might be useful (to owners and visitors) to have a means for site owners to find out whether they are explicitly being blocked and hence losing potential income due of obnoxious advertising.

> I noticed that a lot of newpapers seem to have ads that make me want to turn and run away.

The top offender on my list is NYTimes.com, to which I am a paying subscriber (unfortunately there was no "pay for ad-free NYTimes.com" option). I am particularly annoyed by flash ads that shift DOM elements all over the place; my favorite was a recent full-screen ad that mimicked the appearance of the real NYT frontpage.

I think the reason that sites like this do not give you an option to pay for an ad-free version, is that their selling point to advertisers is their large nation-wide reach. They would shoot themselves in the foot if they did that.

They could still negotiate a price

Yes. The other problem: you're siphoning off the most affluent customers, which are also the most valuable.

Now there's an interesting statistic. What does each newspaper make of each of it's subscribers/readers in addition to direct fees.

I don't know about this feedback idea.

While there's certainly the matter of personal taste and preference involved, a general idea on what is acceptable and what not should be part of the site owner's common sense. If you present ads with sound / huge overlays that I need to click away in a weird way you are trying to screw me. Why would I _not_ block the ads or (better) ignore the site?

If we would have a good and standard way to give feedback, wouldn't the sites just gravitate towards the maximum of tolerable advertisement abuse?

You're probably right. I personally have no idea. I've sustained a site with ads once in my career and I've never understood why anyone even bothered looking at the ads much less clicking them.

I figure if a site's ads are annoying I can still block the ads - just that it could be helpful for the site owner to know that I am Explicitly blocking their ads. I suppose my thoughts on opening a channel of communication is to say that I don't mind ads as long as they're respectful of my purpose for visiting a site, and that communication is better than trial and error.

Some sites I use detect AdBlock, and either ask for me to switch it off or to give them a donation.

I've always assumed they detect it by noticing that a function defined in the ad-serving js is not present in the page.

Most just wait a bit and detect if the ad is hidden (`display:none` or `visibility:hidden`) using javascript.

It shouldn't be too difficult to write a small bit of JavaScript to detect if your ad is being displayed, or if it has been hidden/removed from the DOM.

Yes, an information for site owners why they are blocked would be great. But I don't know how we could implement this in a good way. If someone has Ideas in this direction I would love to hear them!

Since most ad blockers are whitelist-only, I assume that people using a blacklist ad blocker are explicitly blocking sites with annoying ads. Of course that's merely a generalization based on how I think I would use it.

If the stats are shown historically, a site owner could see that after a redesign or some changes on their site, or maybe after signing up with a new ad vendor, that there was a spike in their ad blocks and rethink their design or deal with said vendor.

I don't know if any of this would play out as I'm visualizing it, but I do feel opening up the conversation between site-owner and visitor to figure out what can be considered useful advertising is good for everyone.

Did you see the discussions on the AdblockPlus blog a while back around trying to be fair to sites with reasonable advertising [0]? That approach does seem to be the reverse of your idea (whitelist sites you frequent, rather than blacklist the bad guys). Maybe if there was an easy way to mark advertising as good or bad, similar to a spam filter?

[0] http://adblockplus.org/blog/an-approach-to-fair-ad-blocking

Reply on news.ycombinator.com