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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

If ads weren't as intrusive as they can be (ie pop-ups, pop unders, auto-played video adverts with audio enable etc) I wouldn't mind them, but when you impose on my expectancy of what a website should work like or behave like then I need to block your advertisements. Otherwise, I would happily allow your ads. Some websites ruin my experience overall, not only do I now have to go out of my way to scour the screen but now I'm ignoring whatever it was I came to your website to begin with, usually at that point I close the website never to return.

I'm all for non-intrusive advertisements.

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I agree.

But advertisers abuse

Maybe it's time for 'ad toning down' instead of blocking all of them, block animated gifs, block big images, etc (though in mobile this is not so bad)

In mobile? I've shut so many sites down in the last two weeks because I couldn't read on my iphone over the ad. It happens less to me in this period on android devices I notice.

Isn't that the entire point of AdBlock's default allowing of non-intrusive ads? People like to rant about them "selling out," but IMO it's a reasonable approach to allow decent sites to make a living, is a good monetization strategy, and they seem to have reasonable and global requirements for what constitutes a "non-intrusive" ad. (i.e.: It's not just a case of "pay us enough to blast loud popup videos in the user's face.")

This is precisely why I run adblock plus is non-intrusive ad only mode.

"Allowing non-intrusive ads" seems like a fine goal to help users and advertisers alike. If a community of users maintained the whitelist, it would be a non-issue.

The fact that the list is managed privately and that whether a company pays them influences whether they're blocked does muddy the waters quite a bit.

https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads-agreements#payment

Not all ad blockers do this. Eg: https://getadblock.com/ doesn't (disclosure: creator is a friend of mine and I once worked a bit on the product). uBlock also doesn't do this: https://www.ublock.org/

And I'm sure there are others.

you add "tracking ads" to this list, and I'm all for it.

>I'm all for non-intrusive advertisements.

I'm pretty sure that the ad companies measure what kind of ads work, and which doesn't and what you're asking is that they leave the ineffective ads in place and remove the ones you can't ignore.

Honestly I don't believe that online ads work very well, they are a waste of money, but it's pretty hard to prove, so companies keeps buying them, just to be sure.

What's the solution then, regulation? Imagine how bad our public spaces and television advertising would be if there were no regulation whatsoever. If we're walking towards that eventuality online, something needs to be done to arrest that very soon.

"I'm all for non-intrusive advertisements."

Is that really true though? Do you want "news" articles to be written by advertisers? Instead of journalism, you have an ad that blurs the line between reporting facts and advertising content. As John Oliver pointed out (and I'm sure others), even the New York Times has done some of these types of articles[1]. Is that the future you want? If an article on juice being sold in schools is really written by Snapple, but you can't tell, do you trust the advertiser to write an article with relevant facts?

[1] http://adage.com/article/media/york-times-runs-native-ad-ora...

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