An Ad Blocker Opens the Gate, Ever So Slightly

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/business/media/adblock-plus-allowing-some-online-advertisements.html

by webwanderings • 15 years ago

68 54 15 years ago

nytimes.com

tuananh• 15 years ago

more revenue stream?

thealistra• 15 years ago

Well it's time to find good alternatives.

I'm personally using adsuck: https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck

It's a caching dns server with 'sucking out' ads. It's very nice, but has some drawbacks. You have to kill SIGUSR1 the process to reread the file with blocked sites, where in adblock you just added an exception.

greedoshotlast• 15 years ago

I'm looking for alternatives as well for ad block plus. Anyone used Privoxy before?

ortatherox• 15 years ago

on OSX I use Glimmer Blocker

andrewflnr• 15 years ago

Can someone please explain why this got downvoted?

MichaelApproved• 15 years ago

Why look for alternatives instead of changing the default setting of a program that works really well?

aw3c2• 15 years ago

Blocking ads on DNS level sounds not too useful for me. What if you want to block just a URL pattern on a domain but not the whole domain (eg somesite.tld/annoying-flashy-banners/* or somesite.tld/tracking.js )?

jerrya3• 15 years ago

The way “acceptable ads” works, Mr. Palant and Mr. Faida explained, is that Web sites agree to publish certain advertisements that meet Adblock Plus’s standards on intrusiveness — no beeping or flashing, nothing that slows the computer’s operations. They are then added to the “white list” of acceptable advertisements.

Well, I'm okay with this.

I don't block Slashdot ads, though Slashdot gives me that option. I don't block ads at FARK because FARK enforces non-intrusive ads. There are other sites that ask me not to block their ads, and I usually white list them as long as their ads are not intrusive, and that follows what adblock plus seems to be seeking:

no pop-ups, not flashing, no marquee, no flash crap,

I don't mind websites making money, I prefer the ones I like stay in existence. I only ask that their ads let me read the damn site and not attack my senses.

derefr• 15 years ago

I'd be fine with it if one of the requirements was "does not take more than 100ms to load." For me, the point of AdBlock is that pages aren't blocked from rendering by needing to pull down external dependencies. (Ads are one example, but analytics scripts and "like" buttons also count.)

jerrya3• 15 years ago

Yes, that's an excellent requirement!

wanderr• 15 years ago

Sites need to load ads asynchronously, after content. When ads can't block the site from rendering, it doesn't matter how long they take to load.

throwaway64• 15 years ago

They still allow ads with javascript, which means a major reason to block ads (rouge ads that deliver exploits and malware) are still an issue that their users are not protected against by default.

jerrya3• 15 years ago

I don't know what's happening in adblock plus' forums, but the no javascript, and quick loading requirements are totally reasonable and very important.

rogerbinns2• 15 years ago

My biggest problem is quite simply that ads I see are never relevant. Hulu ads are dreadful - it is almost as if they deliberately tried to find the least relevant ads. Normal web site ads are just not remotely right for me. I would have no problem with ads being tailored for me by using additional information but every time I opt in to that kind of profiling it doesn't seem to make any difference.

exolab2• 15 years ago

The quality of targeting differs greatly depending on

a) the technology used b) how much exposure you have to technology that can capture your interests (or your socio-demographic profile etc.)

If you use Gmail you will find that their ads are usually quite a good match for your interests, because the amount of exposure with Google is huge for the average user, and because they can use semantic contextualization on your mails...

nostromo• 15 years ago

I'm ok with that too, but not ok with this:

> Mr. Faida has left open the possibility that some big Web sites will pay his start-up as part of the new service

This sounds like a shake down; pay us or your ads will be blocked.

oldstrangers3• 15 years ago

I'm ok with it in the sense that someone else (Ghostery) will just come along and replace ABP anyways.

Confusion• 15 years ago

Like Google shakes you down: pay us more than your competitor, otherwise we will rank him higher for selected search terms?

Like all bakeries conspire to shake you down: pay us, or you don't get any bread?

ABP is not a monopolist nor do they do anything illegal. Therefore, they are not 'shaking anyone down'.

drivebyacct22• 15 years ago

The glad for open source and love that someone can fork something if they want to or feel they need to, but I have a hard time understanding bits like this:

>While some have couched their concerns within long notes about their affection for the project, others, like “felix,” kept it short: “ ‘acceptable ads’ is an oxymoron ... i accept no ads. you fail; goodbye.” There has been a movement proposing to “fork” the project — that is, run a version of Adblock Plus before the changes, as is allowed for open-source projects.

It sounds like the defaults are being changed and it's easy to switch back to "block all". Seems like the "fork" would be a boolean value in a default config file.

AndyKelley• 15 years ago

Don't underestimate the power of defaults:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/01/the-power-of-defaul...

drivebyacct22• 15 years ago

I get that, I think here though, the idea is that those defaults are probably fine for the average user that can't be bothered to check the config. (On a tangential note, as that link talks about reinstallation and rote reconfiguration, this would be an example of where unix-style/philosophy is so nice. Configure it once, back up your config files in version control and you're good to go even if you reinstall.)

fl3tch• 15 years ago

Palant said explicitly in a blog post that he turned the whitelist on by default because the vast majority of people don't change the default.

The forum has also been inundated by complaints (I've been following this) from people who installed ABP for 4, 5, 6 of their non-tech savvy friends who don't know what's going on, why ABP stopped working, and how to change it back. Thus, Palant has unwittingly caused (perhaps) hundreds of thousands of people to be inundated with tech support requests from their friends. That's part of the backlash.

w1ntermute• 15 years ago

Yes, it would be more a (one line) patchset than a full-blown fork.

jpdoctor• 15 years ago

> Seems like the "fork" would be a boolean value in a default config file.

The message is much louder than the output of diff.

CurtHagenlocher• 15 years ago

If it were possible for everybody to block all advertising all the time, it would kill today's internet more effectively than SOPA.

naner• 15 years ago

If all ad-supported sites went down tomorrow, the Internet would still work fine and there would still be content.

Just not as much.

georgemcbay• 15 years ago

Considering that both Google and Bing are "ad-supported sites", the big problem for most people (including me) wouldn't be that there would be less content but that it would be too painful to find.

greenyoda• 15 years ago

Less content could actually turn out to be better. For example, many of the content farms and linkbait blogs would disappear. That could be a good thing.

mike-cardwell3• 15 years ago

No it wouldn't. Hacker News would still exist, most blogs would still exist. Shopping websites would still exist. Sites which make money via affiliate links and referrals would still exist. Netflix would still exist. Many sites which rely on advertising would convert to other methods of making money, and would be successful. Some would convert and fail, but not all.

Email would still exist, IM would still exist. Usenet would still exist. IRC would still exist.

Facebook and Twitter would probably die. RSS would still exist. Projects like Diaspora would have more chance of succeeding with no competition from privacy abusing ad reliant services like Facebook.

The Internet wouldn't die. The Internet would continue to thrive, and would probably end up providing a much nicer user experience. Most of the services which die, would be the ones that treat the user as the product for sale, and can't make money if that user is no longer a product. That would be a good thing.

paulhauggis2• 15 years ago

"The Internet wouldn't die. The Internet would continue to thrive, and would probably end up providing a much nicer user experience."

I think at this point, you would probably see many more pay-only websites. I could easily see the major Internet providers getting together with website owners and charging for premium services almost like bundled cable packages.

"Projects like Diaspora would have more chance of succeeding with no competition from privacy abusing ad reliant services like Facebook."

In a world without ads, Diaspora still wouldn't succeed. Since they can't sell advertising reliably for money, they would have to either sell products or charge a monthly fee. Most people aren't going to pay a monthly fee for a facebook-like service and without the popularity, it would be just another failed startup.

ianlevesque2• 15 years ago

> Adblock Plus’s lead developer, Wladimir Palant, has tried to quell the anger, replying personally to the disappointed commenters and explaining that the introduction of “acceptable ads” is true to his vision for the ad-blocking project. The project was never meant to rid the Internet of all advertising, he says, but of annoying advertising.

This may have been his goal, but a lot of users (myself included) obviously don't want ANY advertising. It's not that I don't want to support content creation, I would just rather pay real dollars for the services I use than be sold as a commodity to advertisers. I put my money where my mouth is, subscribing to premium ad-free versions of music sites, and paying for online subscriptions to news sites. I also donate to Wikipedia. These are all great ways to support websites that don't involve being subjected to advertising. I don't mind if website operators want to use advertising as a revenue model, but they should be offering a "pay me to opt out". When this becomes widespread, Adblock Plus will be unnecessary.

> “I just talked to a tech Web site here in Germany, they have seven employees and 40 percent of their users have ad-blockers,” he said. “There was a tech convention in America, and they couldn’t afford to send more than one journalist because so many of their ads are being blocked.”

They should charge for their site. Some nontrivial number of those 40% users would pay, and a paid user is ridiculously more profitable in most cases than the highest CPMs.

avolcano• 15 years ago

> They should charge for their site. Some nontrivial number of those 40% users would pay, and a paid user is ridiculously more profitable in most cases than the highest CPMs.

I don't think you understand why ads are the funding of choice for most of the internet.

Imagine the last time you read a random article on a tech blog. You probably were linked to it on HN, or a friend linked it on Twitter, or on Reddit, or whatever. It's likely not something that is in your news feed.

For most people, that is how they find content. There's a minority of users who will use RSS or follow specific sites on Twitter, but 99% of users will be linked to it, or maybe Google it, or otherwise stumble across it. They have no actual ties to that site, and will likely read what they are linked and then leave the site until it shows up on HN/Reddit/Twitter again.

Now, there are a few sites that have loyal followings. I'm subscribed to GiantBomb.com, for example, because I love its content. But for most sites, putting content behind a paywall would destroy them. No one will pay to read a random article they were linked - and people won't link articles that they know their friends would have to pay to read.

Instead, sites must make money from incoming traffic - and thus, ads. If you have 500 regular readers but see 10,000 coming in from a Reddit post, you'll get money from those page views.

And, of course, this is also why "pay to opt out" is flawed: you're not going to pay every site you visit over the course of the day (possibly 200+, if you're an avid news/social bookmarking reader) to remove those ads, no matter how convenient.

I know we like to pretend that web users will reward the best content by paying, but that model ignores the way the web works. It's not like there's 20 sites we all read; there's a ton we see every day.

ianlevesque2• 15 years ago

Yeah, ultimately I'd love to see ABP offer a tip jar or subscription I could pay that could then be distributed to the operators of the sites I visit. Perhaps take all the sites I visited and divide out the subscription fee. This way you could support even infrequently visited sites without resorting to advertising.

extension• 15 years ago

Rather than whitelisting specific advertisers, why not come up with some acceptably non-annoying ad templates and tell the filter to let through things that match the template? Advertisers can just fill in the template and they'll know their ads will be shown. Make the template invisible if there's no ad blocker.

I think this might be the ultimate solution to the online advertising issue: the advertisers provide abstract content and the users decide if and how they want to look at it.

nas• 15 years ago

Sounds like an idea. The security principle of "enumerating the good" rather than "enumerating the bad" is an old one. You could define an HTML subset that would be acceptable, perhaps putting total size limits on certain things. That approach would also have effect of keeping the decision of what's acceptable unbiased.

exolab2• 15 years ago

There are size-limits on ads. Actually there have always (read: for the last 10+ years) been limits. Also, ad servers are usually rigorously tested with regards to performance, speed etc.

Not all sites enforce these limits, but major publishers are very aware of users' interests.

The problem is that if you visit an average website, there will probably be 20+ servers involved in serving the page, the javascripts, analytics, ads, etc.

One of those systems occasionally underperforms, which would not be a problem if everything but the main content was simply loaded asynchronously, possibly in the order of importance a website owner attaches to each content type.

mrobataille• 15 years ago

Remember the people who thought music piracy was over after Napster got shut down?

Once the masses get used to a certain convenience, and that convenience is taken away, someone will inevitably spring up to provide it again.

So it really doesn't matter what direction ABP takes - just the fact that it set a precedent for an ad-free experience is enough to ensure someone will provide it in the future.

HSO• 15 years ago

In an interview, Mr. Faida focused on the plight of those smaller Web sites that had suffered collateral damage from ad-blocking programs. […] “I just talked to a tech Web site here in Germany, they have seven employees and 40 percent of their users have ad-blockers,” he said. “There was a tech convention in America, and they couldn’t afford to send more than one journalist because so many of their ads are being blocked.”

So? The very concept of ads is flawed. There are two things consumers want: a) discovery, b) reviews. Both are best served by independent parties, filters, “editors”, gatekeepers who earn the trust of consumers by doing, guess what, good introductions and good reviews. Sometimes, consumers take it upon themselves to spread the word or write good reviews. Other times, consumers should pay for these things. And producers should concentrate on making good products. Advertising is conscious, paid-for, explicit manipulation of other people. Why is it so hard for some people to not whitewash it and see it for what it is?

bad_user• 15 years ago

Reviews done with the intention of earning money are going to be naturally biased.

mseebach• 15 years ago

That depends on where the money comes from. As long as the reviewed products aren't the source of the money, there's no inherent risk of bias.

oldstrangers3• 15 years ago

As someone who relies on advertising for my livelihood, and as someone who runs both ABP and Ghostery, I can awkwardly sympathize with both sides. Ultimately though, I still 100% believe that the end user should have ultimate say in what does and does not come across their computer. If they want to block something, that's their right. It's my burden to create the value, not the users.

So yes, ABP allowing ANY kind of advertisements kind of pisses me off. It's like creating a safety switch for a gun that allows certain kinds of bullets to be fired.

nextparadigms2• 15 years ago

I don't know if there's a good alternative for Adblock Plus on Firefox, but for Chrome there's one called simply "Adblock", which has been there since the beginning on Chrome, before Adblock Plus, and I'm happy with it.

slowpoke• 15 years ago

I'm not up to date on this, but wasn't it actually impossible to really block ads on Chrome? As in, they aren't even loaded (that's what ABP does afaik), not merely hidden from display. I seem to remember this was the case a while ago, and I'm unsure if that has changed - Google being an ad company and all.

Someone please correct me if I am wrong.

corin_2• 15 years ago

I don't use any adblocker software and also make a living from (good quality) advertising, but yes I agree that users should have the right to chose.

However, two issues with your logic:

1.) Users have the right to install the ad-blocking plugins available, that doesn't mean the ABP devs have an obligation to provide it. They too have rights, one of which is to change ABP in any way they like, or to kill it off alltogether.

2.) With this change, ABP users STILL have the ability to block all adverts, so this ABP change hasn't actually prevented them from doing that if they wish.

oldstrangers3• 15 years ago

ABP has the unique advantage of being one of the original ad blockers (or even THE definitive ad blocker). People like me flocked to them for very specific reasons. They are now fundamentally changing the way they do business; alienating those of us that came calling in the first place.

Perhaps even doing "business" at all is now a problem. Offering to allow advertisements for companies that pay enough money seems as shitty to me as when No Script coded in ways to prevent Ad Block from disabling the ads on their site. The internet flipped its shit over that, but somehow this same practice seems ok when its carried out with large sums of money? Right.

There's a trust issue with ABP that seems to have been fundamentally ruined. I wish them luck but I will personally be looking into other alternatives.

Nick_C• 15 years ago

> end user should have ultimate say in what does and does not come across their computer.

They still will. ABP is proposing that it be a user-configurable option.

An Ad Blocker Opens the Gate, Ever So Slightly

Related Stories