Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is that AdBlock Plus is becoming popular.

Advertisers are noticing it too. And it will become a whac-a-mole game, in which advertisers will come up with creative ways to get around ADP or publishers will just block users with ADP enabled, or just setup a paywall.

We are indeed tired of intrusive advertising. But some websites are good citizens and shouldn't be punished for the mistakes of others. It wouldn't be in our long-term interest.

For example - Reddit is a good citizen. It only has an image in their right toolbar. Many times they just advertise for other reddits you might be interested in, which is also cool. I even clicked it a number of times.

So why punish websites like Reddit for the mistakes of others? We shouldn't. Reddit provides a valuable service too and the developers working on it need salaries too. And there are other websites like Reddit, also good citizens. It is in our interest to reward these websites - this way advertisers will start getting a clue.

  * It's not becoming popular. It's about 1% of users.
  * It's trivial to get around. Other options would be for
    webmasters to give Adblocking users a watered down
    version or just serve them up crapply encoded
    videos/images etc
    If adblock ever became popular, webmasters would quickly
    work around it, and you'd have an arms race, with the
    webmasters winning.
  * Adblock probably blocks 50% of adverts. The other 50%
    people don't realize are adverts.

It's not becoming popular. It's about 1% of users.

The problem is that this 1% aren't evenly distributed -- some websites are inevitably going to have more Adblock users than others, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that some large sites (reddit?) are hitting 20%.

It's trivial to get around.

Being hostile to their users/customers doesn't seem to be working all that well for the music industry, and just adds to a general feeling of resentment. It is not clear that the result would be any different in another content industry.

Very true, but IMHO That was Reddits own making. Had they put up advertising at the start, they wouldn't be stuck with such an anti-corporate non-marketable audience.

I don't think you can compare to the music industry. Blocking all 'advertising', regardless of whether it's intrusive, useful, etc, is a stupid and naive move by adblock users. Not to mention bad for the free open internet. Thankfully though most people agree that blocking all advertising is not the way forward.

Sometimes I wish PG had a few sub-editors that would go and ban people from having down-vote privileges. IMO you've been down-voted only for saying something (arguably) negative against reddit.

Sigh.

It seems pretty clear that in general redditors are anti-corporate and tautologous that the crowd at reddit would be different if ads had been there from the start.

I think some of the same culture Reddit has, unfortunately spills over to HN. But what do I know....

You are right, however if you love a website, you should tolerate monetization attempts, because websites like Reddit have costs to operate and can't survive otherwise (and if advertisement on a website is very obnoxious, then by definition you cannot love it).

Which is why I don't understand the "anti-corporate" attitude of redditors. I've seen few commercial ads on Reddit because they do a lot of self-promotion. They only have a single box in which ads happen. Those ads are also tasteful and relevant to the subreddits involved. Sometimes they are useful.

I understand being annoyed of ads, but blocking Reddit is a political statement. It's as if you're saying that you want all ads to be completely gone from the net. But seriously, the only general-purpose alternative that would work as a replacement are paywalls. I doubt many redditors have thought this through.

Which is why this move by the AdBlock+ developers surprises me - suddenoutburstofcommonsense (as Slashdot would put it).

It's not becoming popular. It's about 1% of users

One percent of whose users? That fails to account for the audiences of specific websites. If it's 1% for all browser users, I bet you that tech related websites are seeing much, much larger percentages.

I don't think it's related to how 'techie' you are. It's more to do with culture.

Let's not pretend this is a "early adopter tech people know how to block ads, the masses will surely follow in time" thing. It's not.

You'd find similar massive disconnects if you asked who has a TV, who loves "Transformers" movies, and so on.

Frankly, I find that hard to believe. Tech people are much more likely to follow tech news and be informed of addons like ABP than the majority. If you look at the Firefox and Chrome adoption, for example, that certainly happened, so I don't see why would this be any different.

I'm not saying every tech people uses it, of course (I don't), but without data I think the existence of a strong correlation between the two is a fair assumption.

I just think anecdotally and based on content on here, that the majority are far removed from "mainstream". I'd expect people here to not hang out at the mall, watch american idol, eat at mcdonalds, own a TV, watch fox news, click on ads, and so on. The recent poll showed 65% or something to block ads which demonstrates what a niche/bubble HN is.

AdBlock filters and censors content. Personally, that's why I don't use it. I don't want to see a censored internet, I want to see it as it was intended to be seen. If that means I get pissed with a website doing intrusive advertising and never go back there, then that's a good thing, as it's good feedback for that website. There is more than enough choice on the internet which means I will go to websites that play nice.

Adblock usage has been around 1% for the last few years, so I don't see any sign it'll increase.

</rant>

Ok, where are your references for these statements?

I'm especially dubious of the 50% figure.

"...a watered down version or just serve them up crapply encoded videos/images etc"

That is actually a REALLY good idea - serve up smaller, low resolution content and let me easily BUY the higher resolution content (as a download, not some kind of time-limited thing) via a micropayment scheme.

That sounds better than an ad-supported model to me. However, I disagree with the idea that webmasters will "win" this battle - filtering proxies will just get more prevalent, smarter and easier for the average user to install and run. All my LANs already use Privoxy and I'm toying with enforcing it via Group Policy / WPAD / PAC.

I don't think micropayments will ever be a viable alternative to advertising. The internet started free. The cat is out of the bag. Most people won't pay for access to websites.

The distinction between ads and content is one that is ridiculously easy to close if needed.

The only reason that adblock works on a good number of adverts is that they're usually served from an external source. If you serve them from exactly the same place the content is coming from, and make no distinction between the two, then filtering becomes more problematic.

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