An approach to fair ad blocking
adblockplus.org
adblockplus.org
Advertisements are like the maze. In early days, people were forced to sit through them in between parts of shows on the radio. Print ads had to be looked at so that people could find the articles. Nowadays, people are able to get around these 'mazes'. Morally, people might want to support the content-creators, but if you ask any newspaper executive or journalist, guilt can't get you very far for very long. Technology has enabled the blocking of advertisements, and a few mice have had a taste of the easy-to-reach cheese. These mice will almost certainly not go back to trudging through the maze as they did before.
Many critics offer a better solution: Make the mice want to go through the maze. This is certainly a more difficult solution than making a banner ad with a logo. It requires a fair amount of creativity, time, and effort. But some advertisers are already doing this. Take a look at the Burger King games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt2do5oV2-8
Burger King has made their brand fun and engaging, making the consumers want to consume the advertisements. In fact, they pay for them! Now isn't that ingenious?
Another example is woot.com. People want to buy stuff, suppliers want to sell stuff. They connect at Woot, and are directly engaged with the product.
This is the way marketing is supposed to work. Plastering noise and garbage on a webpage will drive your users to clean it up. They will find a way around your maze.
That's why people who block ads stand at 6% of firefox users, which amounts to maybe 2% of total users. Hardly worth worrying too much about.
It's like the people who tell you every second how they haven't owned a TV for years, yet fail to grasp the fact they're nothing like the average joe.
For some reason adblock users seem to consider themselves as 'early adopters'. They're not.
edit: still not sure I quite understand your point here (Or why the downmods). You're saying that adware/spyware generates lots of revenue for ad networks. What does that have to do with the usefulness of advertising on websites?
Hypothesis A: ads are useful, people click on them b/c they deliberately want more info.
Hypothesis B: ads are useless, people click on them only when they are somehow tricked into doing so.
It's obviously the case that out of the set of ad-clickers some are type A and some are type B; the interesting question is the composition of the ad-clicking population.
What follows depends on how you interpret adware and spyware clicks: are they clicked mostly out of confusion (b/c the demographic that has adware/spyware-infected computers tends to be the elderly and other "unsavvy" people) or mostly b/c they're useful to the clicker?
Depending on how you do your weightings you might have to revise down the % of type-A clicks that're going on (and revise it down again to take various kinds of clickfraud into account).
I can't actually tell you if those stats are accurate: I've overheard figures like that from people who might know, but figure they're mostly disgruntled employees exaggerating for effect, so I tend to discount the testimony somewhat.
Remember, the people seeing the adware are the ones who clicked on bonzai buddy in the first place, and/or don't realize the adware on their machine.
These are also the people that don't think there's going to have any trouble canceling that free offer.
(An aside: one of the darkest, most depressing times in my life was working in online advertising. I lasted 6 months.)
"Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000," the study said, and they "are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."
"heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks."
Sure doesn't sound like most people...
Mice don't think like this either. The ones thinking are the maze builders.
As a thought experiment, I can imagine sample groups of advertisements I've seen where even the best ad would garner my disgust, because it was so unbelievably obnoxious and engagement-free.
On the other hand though, given a sample group of effective advertisements, I could imagine being able to indicate the one I would be most likely to click on first. Now this doesn't mean the others aren't engaging and fun. It means the one I indicated is more engaging and fun than the rest, but it is possible they are much more engaging and fun than the former group of crap. At best, I might be compelled to go and visit each of them once I am done with the one before. By that standard, they would all be engaging and fun.
But then, I could be thinking about this wrong. Advertising generally works very poorly on me, and so I might not have the proper frame of reference.
However, I've found it generally true that a small subset of ads strike me as being engaging and fun to my hypothetical advertising consumer. However, I don't think this is a tautology as much as evidence that more effort and concern will make that subset grow larger.
Or, find the user when they are already looking for a maze to go through, and take advantage of that to entertain the user and get some brand placement at the same time. That feels like a better analogy to me; it's far easier to get a user to play your game when they're in a playful mood already. In this case, the maze is the cheese. :-)
Enticing people to go through mazes when they are not in the proper mindset is hard though, even when the maze is compelling and might be enticing given a different mindset. Your potential users need to find out about your toys somehow. I'm not totally familiar with how BK has been marketing these games, but if I'm not in the mood to play a game, no amount of enticing will work. There are a lot of times when I am searching for specific information, and even the most compelling offer of fun and engagement is just an annoying distraction.
I guess this is the long way of saying: make sure to engage them when they want a maze to go through, and make them want it to be your maze. Marketing works best when people want to be marketed to.
It's not the ads on a specific website that I don't like, it's the specific ads on all websites. Also it's not just the ads, it's also the tracking contraptions including javascript bloatware and such. It is far easier for me to just keep blocking them altogether than to rely on a subjective opinion of a webmaster if his ads are annoying or not, and not know what it is exactly that gets unblocked.
Yup, I know this is "stealing". I don't care.
You know what pisses me off far more than any advert in the world? The fact you have to register to read an article on the nytimes website. Can't be bothered. If the web can't monetize through advertising, expect far more moronic walled gardens.
But actually, I subscribe to the NYT, so registering for the site doesn't bother me. I'd rather get something I pay for than get a bunch of crap I don't want (ads) just to read an article.
It's the difference between reading a newspaper you found on the street and reading it over a stranger's shoulder.
It's the difference between adding a few pieces during a game of chess against yourself and doing the same against someone else.
It's the difference between walking down a street and pushing someone aside to do that.
It's the difference between reading a book in the library and reading it in the bookstore.
I see a possible solution in tracking users' decisions to show or disable supposedly unintrusive ads. This way ABP will be able to see which websites likely abuse this feature and which websites are likely fair in claiming non-intrusiveness. So, in 'obvious' cases ABP could make an automatic decision to show or hide the ads.
P.S. I hope the above is readable.
If a site is using intrusive or irritating advertising, don't visit it.
OTOH, if blockers are such a tiny minority, why are you so concerned?
I'm concerned by the general decline of morality online.
Big difference.
We are talking about private for-profit web sites. They are not a shared public good like rivers, the air, or indeed the english "commons" of old.
Imagine if you did that on a personal level - if someone started talking to you about a new movie they saw that they liked, and you instantly cover your ears so you can't hear them.
Your analogy is a terrible one, by the way. A better one is picking up an ad-supported magazine, and asking a helpful friend (one whose judgement you trust - the parallel here being to the EasyList maintainers) to rip all the ads out for you before you read it.
If people could block ads on TV and in print, prevent themselves from seeing billboards, etc, newsflash: they would! If I could go through my life without being subjected to people trying to sell me stuff all the time, I would be a much happier person.
Just because we grew up in a world dominated by consumerism does not mean that's the way it should be, or the only way it can be. If more people were proactive in refusing to be marketed to I believe the benefits would be positive for all of society.
You solicited it with your visit to the site. You didn't leave when confronted with the choice of using my site and viewing ads or leaving. If you don't like my ads, by all means: LEAVE.
Just like if I own a bookstore and you come in every day and read books and never buy anything. Pretty soon I'll ban you.
I invited genuine customers of course, not leeches.
You're not doing this by hand. The selectively loading argument is patently absurd. You're altering the standard behaviour of your web browser with the strict intention of denying a site owner their revenue source. You're using something without paying for it.
> and if your business model cannot support people that do it you're fucked.
This is not about my business model. My business model can support it fine, partly because there's so few people like you.
No, this is about morally corrupt people that need a lesson in civility.
No. They wouldn't. Guess how I know what films are out at the moment. I look at billboards. I see adverts. They tell me useful stuff.
You're a tiny tiny minority.
>> "Just because we grew up in a world dominated by consumerism does not mean that's the way it should be, or the only way it can be. If more people were proactive in refusing to be marketed to I believe the benefits would be positive for all of society."
You seem to be under the delusion that marketing is a bad thing. It's providing useful information to potential consumers. It works. People like it. It's not going away.
Just don't come running to me when you can no longer visit most websites since they've blocked you.
I started blocking ads when certain sites would bog down my browser with flash (namely, Entrepreneur.com). That's when I discovered ABP. It's just a nicer surfing experience for me without them. But then again, I'm the kind of person that thinks Nike is crazy if they expect me to pay for a t-shirt that simply says "Nike" on it (or carries their swoosh).
Just between you and me (I doubt anybody else is reading any more) I get annoyed at movie previews for the same reason...:) I think I'm the only one on the planet with that particular defective gene.
What I absolutely hate is adverts in cinemas, and the previews/non skip items on DVDs. To subject people to advertising like that when they have already paid is indefensible.
Nonsense! What trust? You put up a website, I visit it. If your whole operation is based upon the "trust" that I'm also going to view your ads - you've got another think coming.
Anyway, I see it from the opposite angle. It was websites abusing my trust - that I would be able to view their content without being subjected to inane, distracting ads - that led me to this attitude in the first place. Adblock users were created, not born.
"You're assuming the website you visit is going to be intrusive and horrible to you."
This is an assumption born of long and miserable experience and I stand by its general accuracy. 75% rule!
"You're putting your fingers in your ears and saying "Nothing you ever say to me is going to be useful to me"."
If I knew someone IRL who spoke with the same abysmal signal-to-noise ratio of your average web advertising, that is exactly what I'd do. Or, rather, I'd wear some kind of filter so I couldn't hear them.
You are constantly defending advertising in this forum - I have to wonder, are we using the same internet? 99.9% of the ads I see are awful. Punch the monkey. Win a PS3! Get your horoscope on your mobile! Repair your Windows registry! They are pure annoying noise. How can you possibly blame me for wanting to block them out?
I have nothing against site owners; hell, I'm a site owner myself. If there was a more surgical way to easily block only the annoying ads, I'd adopt that. There is not, to my knowledge, so I block them all. I don't understand why you can't see that this is a perfectly reasonable reaction.
More likely that you would avoid the person all together. Do the same for websites and everyone is happy.
Erm in what way is that fair? How about the default being that you assume websites won't do intrusive crappy advertising,
and only block ads on the minority websites that persistently abuse that trust.
FWIW, I never block ads because I'm happy to have free content and pay an ad tax.
Normally I'm happy to see the ads. For me it is part of the experience.(Maybe I'm biased in this way cause I work in online media). But there are certain sites that have crappy ads that take too much from the experience.
For example, acceptable ads are:
1) Text only, no larger than the average font size on the page 2) Non-animated images under a particular size 3) Not served by blacklisted domains 4) Or listed by a whitelist-----
--------screeecchhh stopping myself right there, new thought:
What about a plugin which annotates ads with thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. Do what the Gmail "Report spam" button does: develop reputations for advertisers, products, domains, etc. There is probably a great market resource business in here too somewhere....
I guess the summary of my post is that there must be a win-win-win solution in here for users, webmasters, and advertisers.
So, what do you think?
How far does that argument go?
(I am not sure my position on it TBH, thought I would throw it out to you lot).
Everything else is a cost/benefit analysis.
If there were no advertising on the web, I can't help but feel it would still be nothing more than a large internet newsgroup/forum without much that makes it the rich experience it is today.
I guess my point is things like Gmail, flickr, last.fm etc would struggle to exist on subscription only. Perhaps we can do without them all though?
Also, I agree with the poster below with regard to finding content these days, it can be tedious. A search on a subject can find pages of aggregators, e-commerce sites and little in the way of true content. I don't find this the norm, but it happens.
That is my point. I liked it a lot more before the commercial web took over. Once, the web was 99% content. Now it's a real effort to find anything worth reading.
If you call your average vanity page "content", then sure, that's true...
I'll play the devils advocate, with conflicting interests, so
Nope, your goal is perhaps to earn money on the back of the webmaster and that might be considered theft. Some ads are intrusive, yup very. Example in point, the economist. It has so many ads, I hate being on that website for more than a bit. What do I do, click away. Problem solved. I still have the power you see, without necessarily punishing the other webmasters who aren't as intrusive.
Now, of course it is a free market economy. The advertisers want sales so they become intrusive, the publisher wants revenue so they hold the ads, the visitor wants free content so he bears the hassle, or of course being smart installs an adblock and leaves the previous two in cold water. Fair enough, power to him who has the knowledge that such option exists, but no need to come back playing the fox saying you do not really want to give them such option. You clearly are providing a service and that service is attracting only low subscription currently, if it was higher subscription then your service would go cold as the webmasters would adapt. But seriously if by definition a blocker of ads does not destroy advertising then perhaps it should change the name to blocker of something else.
P.S. No wonder I hardly get revenue from Firefox users, perhaps as a way of regression every webmaster should block the smart firefox users and be stuck with the hell of internet explorer.
For example:
// cb = function to call with result
function detectAdblock(cb) {
var tt = document.createElement("div");
tt.style.display = "none";
document.body.appendChild(tt);
var i = document.createElement("iframe");
i.src = "http://adv.foo.com/ads/-adspace?ad_id=&affiliate=&advert=678";
var foo = i.style.cssText;
tt.appendChild(i);
window.setTimeout(function() {
cb(foo!=i.style.cssText);
}, 200);
}
To get around adblock, you can proxy through your own domain, and stay clear of showing the ads in iframe/image/flash. Use js to put them in with everything else as text links which perform far better than any other type of advertising anyway.
Out of curiosity, what kind of audience does your site have? Particularly tech savvy?
But there are a few heuristic methods, basically just loading an image from a blocked domain (it's a sure thing double click will be blocked), waiting, then checking the DOM to see if the element has been removed. Not fool proof, or specific to AdBlock but good enough.
I have a couple of detection demos (including flash block) here: