Norton Antivirus 2004 Ad Blocking - Tough Call? 858
"Now of course this is a sensitive case as, like most sites around, we get most of our revenues from the banners we sell to advertisers. In fact, we get over 50% of our revenues from these banners and many other big sites, like Google, have an even bigger share of their revenues from the banners. Google's AdWords are not spared and, in fact, with ad blocking enabled, I can't even access our AdWords account as the link to access it is 'Advertise with us' on the main page, probably blocked because of the word 'advertise'.
Now, of course nobody likes banners, but for many sites it is a large part of or the only means of revenue and so there is a fragile balance that is at stake. I hate banners, but without them my company has much less revenues, both from less cashflow from advertisers as well as clients, as we depend a lot on Google's AdWords capacity to bring us clients who are specifically searching for what we sell.
Norton Antivirus 2004 now comes bundled with a lot of new PCs, and I saw the problem on many of our clients with new PCs as well as some of our sales representatives, who have a hard time selling a product our potential clients do not see advertised anywhere.
So I'm asking to all you webmasters around what's at stake here and the potential repercussions. I know that for us it will be disastrous if NAV 2004 gains too much popularity and its ad blocking software is used by millions of people. It would mean our corporate clients would not see our banners or ads, our consumer clients would not find us and would not see the banners of our corporate clients, who would then not pay us because they'd be paying for something too many people can't see. We already have some of our clients threatening us to cancel their contracts with us if we don't fix this.
This also brings, in my opinion, the subject of spam and general Internet advertising. While banners are not spam, they're almost as hated, especially those that pop right in our screens and move around with flashy graphics. But where does the limit stand between what we can do with the net and the user experience that we'd all like to have? Of course the Internet still has a lot of grounds to make, still being a mere teen, especially in the capacity of consumers spending money to buy something on a product they already spent a lot of money. Banners are the downside of having a lot of content for free as we pay for it by being annoyed by people who want to sell us stuff instead.
But what could be done instead if users are sufficiently annoyed by banners to request such a tool, as was probably the case considering that ad blocking is automatically enabled in NAV 2004? Web sites need revenues and the consumers are not ready to pay for it, largely because of the natural impoverishment imposed by increasing technologies. Buying a computer now means paying for the hardware, the software, the Internet connection, the gizmos, the subscriptions to sites and of course the upgrades, all of which were not expenses 20 years ago."
WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
So what, Slashdot is now Symantec technical support?
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Funny)
>
> So what, Slashdot is now Symantec technical support?
Reading between the lines, it's even funnier: "So what, Slashdot is now the support mechanism for some webmaster who's pissed that his customers block ads?"
Not just "What the fuck?", thats "What the fuck, what the fucking fuck fuck?"
Is this an ad for Norton? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is this an ad for Norton? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is this an ad for Norton? (Score:2)
its been implemented in a product that already has a huge market penetration by a company people trust, thats why
Re:Is this an ad for Norton? (Score:2)
Re:Is this an ad for Norton? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the author's point is that:
- previous ad-stripping download proxy systems did not typically come preinstalled on a new PC, and
- previous systems were more forward about explaining to users what they did and how they worked, and gave users more options for how to use it than a polar on/off setting.
Free Market (Score:4, Insightful)
The free market isn't always good (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, nobody likes banner ads, and everyone selfishly wants to block them. If everyone did this, content on the web would be diminished, because fewer people could afford to produce web content full-time, and more content would go to subscriber-pay sites. (Or worse, the advertising will become more embedded and harder to filter out, even visually. For example, this sentence is brought to you by the good people at State Farm. Or every web comic would suddenly have a character named Cisco [cisco.com].) Yet if everyone co-operated by not blocking banner ads, free web content is made available to everyone.
And don't give me a lot of crap about "someone will figure out a better business model", unless you can actually point to a particular website with that model, that is succeeding.
All I'm saying is, think about the unintended consequences before you act selfishly, or praise others for doing so.
Which leads me to another point: there's an appalling lack of ethical behavior on the internet. Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so.
[end rant]
Re:The free market isn't always good (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The free market isn't always good (Score:3, Insightful)
And content providers wouldn't have had to come up with innovations like pop-unders and shoshkeles if end-users viewed regular banner ads instead of blocking them.
You can go in circles forever trying to pin the blame on someone, but in order for everyone to win the attempts to undermine the other side have to stop, on BOTH sides. No popup ads. No ad blockers. We need an arms-reduction treaty, not a
Re:The free market isn't always good (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't buy this. Ad blockers have never been used by any significant portion of web users. Advertisers went to more obnoxious techniques not because banners were being blocked, but because they were being ignored.
Re:The free market isn't always good (Score:5, Insightful)
And users would've viewed ads if they weren't annoying and deceptive. I know that one of my major reasons for implementing an ad blocker at home was because I was tired of the flashing, jiggling, "You're visitor number ### to this site, you're a winner!" ads, or the ads that try to look like actual windows (believe it or not, there are users that actually fall for those). If you can't fit a clear, concise, subdued message that properly sells your product in the space of a banner ad, you should not be taking out such an ad in the first place. What do those "You're a winner!", "Punch the monkey!", "You have 1 new emails" ads actually sell, anyway?
Google's text ads are a huge step in the right direction. Non-flash, minimally animated, unobtrusive banner ads are acceptable. The rest are not.
Banner blocking is bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Banner blocking is bad (Score:2)
Re:Banner blocking is bad (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't have to have click-through on an ad banner for it to be effective marketing.
There's no reason web advertising should be judged any differently than print advertising -- if people just look at it and end up with an increased awareness of the product or service being advertised, that ad is successful. The reason banner ads were so overvalued during the dot-com boom and subsequently declared a "failure" is that advertisers had dollar signs in their ey
Re:Banner blocking is bad (Score:4, Insightful)
99% or posters on this topic have basically said "Advertising sucks, any site that can't live without it should cease to exist". Yet all the highest modded posts tell us to grin and bear it, with two or three dozen "what have you smoked today" responses.
I don't often suspect the Slashdot editors of tampering with moderation, but this seems a tad too fishy...
Just to stay on-topic...
Once upon a time, I didn't bother blocking ads. When each site (not page) had a single, unobtrusive banner ad at the top of the main page, I dealt with it, and sometimes even clicked the banner.
Now, every site has three or four ads per page, often in horribly garish colors, that flash and move around (and in many cases, try to outright trick unwary viewers into clicking by looking like a Windows dialog). Some even have sound that you can't just ignore. Some cover the actual text you want to view. Though I personally disabled popups over a year ago, this evening I had the joyous opportunity to browse without that feature on a friends PC, and it amazes me people can stand to visit the web at all with popups... Simply unbelievable how numerous and annoying they have gotten!
Around the time X10 became a household joke among geeks, I set up a 50k hosts file. Now I also have a rather paranoid usercontent.css file.
Many people have made a valid point - Advertisers and content providers have an uneasy alliance that allows both to survive. Both need to realize, however, that unlike TV where the advertisers have a captive audience, on the web we will block their crap if it annoys us too much. This means the advertising doesn't work, and the content providers go under. Bad for everyone involved.
So I'll make a deal with advertisers (and those dependant on them) everywhere, right now - Go back to unobtrusive single-banner-per-main-page ads, and I'll view your annoyances. Piss me off with motion and sound and obscuring the actual content, though, and you guarantee that I'll do everything in my power to block your ads, up to and including never visiting an otherwise "cool" site again if I can't block the ads.
Re:Banner blocking is bad (Score:3, Funny)
Putting little black circles in front of things doesn't make them "research".
Re:Banner blocking is bad (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, but I wanted to be REAL convincing.
Did it show?
Re:Banner blocking is bad (Score:3)
Re:Banner blocking is bad (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect that your researchers:
* Carried out their research a couple of years ago when line speeds were slower.
* Looked at sites with lots of flashing animated banners.
* Are biased in favour of whales.
I recently added Google adwords to my site. I run my site as a hobby, so it's not like I need to earn money from it, but the ads are helping to cover costs (though not completely).
I really like the Adwords service. The ads are unobtrusive, text based, low bandwidth, and they
Re:Banner blocking is just fine (Score:4, Insightful)
Here, here. I wouldn't bother to block ads if it weren't for the inane stupid tricks advertisers try to use. The onslaught of Flash ads was the final straw. I now use Privoxy at work and home.
I like Google's take on advertising - and Privoxy leaves these alone. Its a shame that Symantec's product doesn't.
Re:Banner blocking is just fine (Score:3, Insightful)
It might be worth pointing out that not only does Google do all this right - but they have always plainly labled their ads. Some site's ideas of text ads were to mix it in to the search content. I believe everyone is pretty straight forward now - but it took legal threats to get some on board. Google was there from day one.
Re:Banner blocking is bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering your "tough shit" attitude, I'd be willing to help write an Apache module that detects IPs who view my pages but not my ads, and block those IPs for an hour or so. Don't like it if I don't want you to view my content without viewing my ads? Tough shit. (Yeah, maybe you set up Proxomitron to render the ads but not actually *display* them... which is fine by providers, because the ad impression is still counted. Unfortunately, most ad blockers don't do this.)
Re:Banner blocking is bad (Score:3, Insightful)
It would end up costing you more in the end if you tried to block the blockers by checking to see if they downloaded your ads too. Those such as myself who block ads to decrease pageload time and reduce stress would simply switch to filters that fake it. So you would be wasting bandwidth sending me ads I never see.
Yeah, maybe you set up Proxomitron to render the ads but
ads are one thing... external images though? (Score:3, Interesting)
Then in essence this software is rewritting a copyrighted work without permission of the copyright holder, is it not?
Re:ads are one thing... external images though? (Score:2)
These guys are selling Playboy that automatically covers all their revenue raising ads.
Re:ads are one thing... external images though? (Score:3, Informative)
But you're allowed to do that, provided the modified work is for your own private enjoyment. It's not illegal to doodle in the margins of a book you've purchased, is it?
This assumes a willful act on the part of the consumer to enact those modifications, though. If this software is pre-installed and activated, before the consumer ever gets to touch the computer, that could be a gray area.
Find a new business model (Score:2)
Webwasher been doing it for years (Score:4, Informative)
BTW For Mozilla/Firebird, the adblock extension is a more flexible solution then the "Block images from server" feature, as it can do pattern matching base on URL, more info from here: http://adblock.mozdev.org/
Re:Webwasher been doing it for years (Score:5, Funny)
Is there a similar product that strip out verb conjugation? It look like my machine might have such a system installed.
Firebird (Score:5, Informative)
Google (Score:2)
Why does the Consumer have to accept advertising? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why does the Consumer have to accept advertisin (Score:3, Insightful)
A good webhosting provider will run $1/month/100MB of space, and $1-$2/GB of transfer. If they're charging less, don't expect any sort of reliability.
Re:Why does the Consumer have to accept advertisin (Score:3, Insightful)
You are right when you say that advertising does not create the medium, but you will either pay for the medium yourself or have the advertiser to pay for it. The choice is yours, but advertising is not a parasite, but has a normal place in the 'food-chain' of the internet.
It's not really different from the other media. Want commercial free TV? Pay for it. Want free television, get
Content (Score:5, Insightful)
The fundamental problem is that people who create things on the net as their full-time jobs need to somehow get paid for the effort. Banner ads are not perfect, but so far nobody has found anythiing better to balance the needs of users with those of advertisers.
Once the Internet becomes more than a purely amateur medium, it requires the elements of professional publication, and one of them is ads. It's either that or pay, and I think those who complain most vociferously about banner ads are the least likely to fork out real bucks for content.
D
Re:Why does the Consumer have to accept advertisin (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertising doesn't create the medium, nor the content, but it darn well supports them.
I work for a web site that derives the bulk of its revenue from advertising? That salary goes to pay the salaries of about 30 employees and for the bandwidth from about 3 billion pageviews a year.The advertisers pay the couple of million dollars a year it costs to run our site.
If you remove the advertising, you remove our site from the internet, because we're darn well not about to work full time for free, plus tap our wallets to pay for the bandwidth you're using.
There is an implicit agreement between publishers and readers. We'll provide you content you deem valuable, and in return for that value, you'll view ads. You can gloss over them, don't even have to pay attention to them, but they have to pass in front of your eyeballs along with our content.
If you pay for your net access and just want to e-mail with friends, chat on IRC, post messages on newsgroups, and access personal web sites, you should never ever have to see an ad. You're paying your ISP for the bandwidth and no one else is having to pay for the content you're enjoying.
But if you want a free mail account with Hotmail or Yahoo, want to read content on professionally produced web sites, watch streaming video, etc., you must either be willing to pay subscription fees or suffer through some banners. For many sites, a subscription model doesn't work for any number of reasons.
If you use blockers to remove banners from content it is costing someone else money to produce and deliver to you, it is not the advertising that is a parasite. You are the parasite.
- Greg
Internet was free before banner ads (Score:5, Insightful)
you replace them with google's ad model (Score:2)
sorry, but the internet does evolve
ad systems will still be around, they are never going away on the internet, but they will come to resemble google's ad model: sparse, text-only, straight to the point
not stupid "hit the monkey on the head and get a free prize" carnival atmosphere flashing gifs and javacript
it's nauseating and insults the user and they h
Not our problem -- it's yours (Score:3, Insightful)
funding. Those of us who dislike ads (probably 98% of the planet) will do our best not to see them,
and the more technically inclined among us WILL block your ad, and the business-savvy subset of
those will sell that setup, in some form, to the rest. If websites can't live without it, tough.
If they find another way to get funds, wonderful, but your funding is, to me, a black box that we shouldn't need to think about. I'm perfectly happy spending some time fiddling with Internet Junkbuster or Privoxy to cut out web ads, and tweaking my mail filters to remove advertisements from yahoo mailing lists if I get good results.
Re:Not our problem -- it's yours (Score:3, Informative)
Can't recommend it strongly enough... nor agree with Improv more. 8)
Re:Not our problem -- it's yours (Score:5, Insightful)
First, I highly doubt the number is that high. If asked I'm sure most people would rather watch their favorite TV show with annoying commercials than have that TV show go off the air. Second, you make the choice not to visit the site if you think that their ads are too intrusive. However, if you block ads (other than potentially harmful ads like ActiveX or popups) then you are essentially stealing from the site. The site is, in good faith, giving you content for the price of viewing an ad. If people didn't click ads, then ads wouldn't exist. I do business with a website that makes a lot of money on ads, and their click-thru rates prove that people view ads. They spend a lot of money to provide people with content, assuming people accept the download of their advertisement. Again, why do you need to block ads? Why not just go to another site? Free loading is not the answer to a successful web.
Personally, I wish banners didn't exist either. But I'm also a realist. I would never pay for slashdot, but I use it all the time. I use their bandwidth and CPU cycles on a daily basis. Their ads have gotten bigger over the last two years, and while I don't like it, I appreciate the reasons why they had to do it. If so many people blocked ads that slashdot was a forced subscription site, I would stop visiting. Heck, if that was bound to happen I'd work on some OSS project to thwart ad blockers. I don't want you freeloaders taking away my "free" content!
Linux isn't ad supported, and its free... (Score:2)
however, i just had to make the point that linux is free, and is not ad supported. you don't need ads to make money on a site.
not that "be a subscriber!" (ahem, slashdot crew) is that much better, but imo a website should be a passion thing, not a money maker.
i'm personally fine with ads though. there's nothng wrong with them unless they are popups. even clickthroughs are fine, as far as im concerned. hence
Re:Linux isn't ad supported, and its free... (Score:2)
That's all well and good, but passion doesn't pay the bills. Even with a well paid job, if the site does get popular, those bills are soon going to add up to a fair chunk of cash.
Re:Linux isn't ad supported, and its free... (Score:2)
Psst, nobody better tell this guy about Mandrake [slashdot.org] :)
Granted, Mandrake's ads aren't really annoying, they're just there, but still a point worth mentioning :)
You just answered your own question (Score:2)
I think that settles the issue fairly well. If the spam filter sucks, then the majority (who are smart enough to turn it off) will turn it off. If it manages to satisfy the majority (doubtful but possible) then people will keep it on.
Re:You just answered your own question (Score:5, Interesting)
A few good assumptions to make when designing software:
1) Set the defaults to something useful. 90% of users will never change them, and 75% don't even know what a "preferences" dialog is.
2) Make clicking "Yes" the safe option. Users frequently don't read dialog boxes.
3) Don't give users any decision more complicated than a three-way choice, and if possible, make it a binary (on-off) choice. Anything more complicated just increases tech support calls.
Guess what? Most people won't even realize that the ad blocking is on, and even fewer will realize they can turn it off.
The consumer has made his choice (Score:4, Insightful)
You want to make money on the web? Sell something the people want. Give them a reason to pay. Extra content, early access, better content. Sell t-shirts. But don't expect the consumer to support your buisness model when it fails. And advertising on the web has failed- its ineffective, it generates no revenue for the advertisers, and its just fucking annoying.
The site owner has choices too... (Score:3, Interesting)
Site owners could make internet dark for Norton users. They could make it very hard for the blocked users to use a site by putting more of the content in off-site hosted images. This would make sites incompatible with Nortoned machines (a note or link would explain how to turn off the offendin
Re:The site owner has choices too... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just like the Do Not Call list, or the "skipping commercials is theft" idiocy. We, the consumers, have the right to take steps with our own property (telephones, computers, bandwidth we pay for) to stop practices that annoy us. You do not have the right to stop us from doing so. You have the right to deny us your content if we do so, but you do not have the right to force your buisness model down our throats.
Re:Not insightful when not paying attention (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets face facts- advertisements are annoying. Thats why 60 million Americans signed up for the do not call list. Thats why so many people ALREADY block popups and images. Hell, its one of the reasons mozilla became popular- it blocked ads. SO, given all this- do you really think the very many people will be upset that it blocks ads? No- they're going to be estatic. Come on- do you really think that if you went to a guy on the street and asked if he wanted the ads back he'd s
I don't have that (Score:3, Informative)
Makes me curious if there was another version of the program featuring banner-blocking after I purchased mine -- which would of course be typical.
Re:I don't have that (Score:3, Informative)
If you're running Windows, and you have broadband, you need a firewall.
Re:I don't have that (Score:2)
(I learned the hard way -- had to get a trojan on my machine before realizing, oops, need a firewall.)
The Solution?? (Score:2)
Norton Antivirus doesn't run on Linux!!
The "free internet"? You're kidding, right? (Score:2)
If banner ads fail, more and more sites will be forced into a pay model, and the days of the "Free Internet" will be almost over.
First of all, when the internet started it was free. Advertising sleazed in years after the whole structure was in place. The internet didn't need it then, and it doesn't need it now. I know my inbox sure doesn't need any more "advertising".
Second, not everybody uses Norton Antivirus. Or even Windows for that matter. And not only Norton blocks popups. You can do that y
Banner ads are fine with me... (Score:2)
Seriously, they're fine with me, as long as they don't go nutso with the gifs and the flash. Bandwidth appears to be getting steadily cheaper, and the new google ad-targeting system appears to be working and generating revenue (at least based on the growing adoption of it.)
As noted above, there are tons of ways to block ads, if you're so inclined. This is neither new nor unique.
Crazy (Score:2)
Adding the function to let certain ad banners through because you want to "support" that site is stupid. It should be nominated for the most unused feature of a software program right up there with the "please send more spam" button.
I use the "block images from this server" in Mozilla on a regular basis. I block all cookies unless it breaks functionality on a site I want to access.
When it was sugge
Don't care about banner ads (Score:2)
It's going to wreck any site that uses deep-linking, if the linking is done via server-side code, as any images in the linked-to page will obviously not appear (they're on a remote site!)
However, I doubt anyone'll care too much if these people need to come up wi
Public vs. broadcast TV (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll assume theat you mean broadcast TV and not public TV. Broadcast TV is supported by ads; public TV (i.e. your local PBS station) is supported largely by pledges made by the public (hence the name), with underwriters of some shows.
One may argue that acknowledging the underwriters at the end of a program counts as "advertising" but at least the shows aren't interrupted halfway through and the acknowledgement is generally less than 10 seconds per underwriter (about a minute or so per hour by my guestimate) instead of the 15-20 minutes of advertising per hour of broadcast TV. (http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/ratingsAds.html)
Cliff, you ignorant bitch (Score:2)
the internet was free before you got here. stop acting like it's the end of the world if companies without a business model fail to survive on ad revenues. hell, I'd prefer to go back to the days of the text internet if it would only get rid of all the crap.
Yes or No choice FINE!!! (Score:2)
If people are willing to PAY money for a product that runs on THEIR computer, then it is FINE if users GET an on/off switch. Some people actually like on/off switches rather than POSIX regex libraries.
If the on/off is too clunky, and indeed breaks every image and link to other sites as the submitter claims, then people will get sick of it and turn it off. If it works as well as some of the banner and pop-up things folks pay for they will leave it
Banner Blocking == FF past commericals (Score:2)
On the other hand,
Now I'm confused. When is advertising good and when is advertising bad? I think I'll go home and FF through some commercials...
Ads do not equal free Internet (Score:2)
What you neglect to say is that before banner ads, Gator, pop-unders, etc. there was a very thriving free Internet (excluding ISP charges).
And, btw, it was just fine by me.
In the early 90s I very happily found about the same amount of useful information and free products on the Internet as I do now.
I don't need Amazon to exist to feel like I have a complete Internet experience.
This feature is probably there for a reason. (Score:2)
People are *sick of the CRAP* on the internet. They're sick of the fact that the WWW is becoming a junk ridden flea market.
They're sick of banner ads that go FLASH!FLASH!FLASH! at them and they're sick of misleading "System Error" messages that turn out to be banner ads.
Quite obviously *someone* wants the features that NAV2004 has. Symantec didn't just put stuff in the application because some programmers had a bunch of fr
the internet was NOT free at any point. (Score:5, Insightful)
it costs money to run phone lines, buy routers, hire geeks, maintain hubs, etc.
the fact that these costs were subsidized by the public and/or private universities, such that you never saw them, or were directly affected by them, does not remove this fact.
now, i'm not going to argue that it wasn't nice before
"Free Internet" does not require banner ads. (Score:4, Informative)
The author must be new to the internet. If you go back to the good old days, for example when Yahoo used to be at yahoo.stanford.edu, there were no banner ads. Guess what, the internet was free then.
To claim that the loss of banner ads will automatically lead to the loss of a non-free internet is to ignore history and to show a lack of imagination. Banner ads are only a 1994 invention, they aren't an intrinsic part of either the internet or the world wide web.
Re:"Free Internet" does not require banner ads. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not to say that advertising is a good or viabl
Look for more interstitials (Score:3, Informative)
This is one of many online ad styles you're likely to see becoming more popular if enough people start using ad blocking software to make a noticeable difference in commercial site ad revenues.
Yahoo Hong Kong is already selling them: See what they look like here [yahoo.com].
- Robin
I don't find banners in general annoying (Score:3, Insightful)
How to avoid your banner ads being blocked (Score:5, Insightful)
None of these methods are perfect, but they can help avoid your banner ads and other web site features from being blocked.
Re:How to avoid your banner ads being blocked (Score:3, Interesting)
Stream all images through a CGI/PHP/Response.BinaryWrite type method. Pass (in the PATH_INFO) a hashed key (for example) that represents that persons Session. You can then keep track of whether or not that session is downloading banners or not. If they use a program like Norton's, it will strip the IMG completely and therefore never hit your script. If the script is never hit, you can redirect the user to a page explaining that while they may not be interested in ads, you need them to
If you want to make money on the internet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Plain and simple. Advertising has always been and will forever be a inherently unstable way to earn money. If you want to be sure you'll make money, you have to actually charge for something.
ObStupidQuestion: So you think slashdot should just go pay only then? Depends on what the people running slashdot want to do. It's big enough on it's own, and part of a big enough family of properties, and the staff seems to be on the small end, so they can probably make do with ad-based stuff. And if this kind of ad blocking technology gets popular enough, the clever people that created the site are more than clever enough to get around ad blockers. And frankly, the quality index oof comments would jump through the roof if it was made pay only. Would I pay? Nope. I come here because it's free, and if it suddenly wasn't, I doubt my life would be any poorer for not surfing this place a few times a day.
Re: Norton Antivirus 2003 Ad Blocking - Tough Call (Score:3, Interesting)
I would recommend replacing them with 1x1 transparent GIFs.
Seriously though, with squid, a redirector, and about 200 rules, I very rarely see banner ads and it keeps my bandwidth costs down.
Sorry, but if I have to choose between a month of "supportive" web surfing and an extra 200MB of download/surfing/whatever, then it's not too hard to see which one I'd pick.
Here is a list of the number of URL rewrites that have occurred since I installed this system:
Feb 15302
Mar 16581
Apr 19221
Jun 20333
Jul 19294
Aug 10320
Sep 15912
Oct 13705
Now, every single one of those rewrites has spared me at the very minimum an HTTP request and a few hundred bytes. This applies only to non-banner objects (such as counters, which I also block). Ads are usually at least 3k with some extending far beyond that.
I should probably remind those that need reminding, that I have a monthly download quota of 3000MB. The bandwidth savings are too significant for me to ignore.
Flame away...
You need to rethink what you are doing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe you should have simply linked to the arti (Score:2)
~Berj
Re:Maybe you should have simply linked to the arti (Score:2)
I, for one, welcome the new "I work for ____ / that ____ has since been let go." troll!
Re:Maybe you should have simply linked to the arti (Score:3, Interesting)
So what kind of ads will they tolerate? I run one ad-sponsored site. It's used standard banner ads since it went online in 1998. I've never received any complaints. They aren't obtrusive and aren't excessive in size or quantity. A single 468x60 up top and a few 100x100 on the left sidebar.
I agree that annoying, flashy animations that distract are annoying. So are pop-ups and pop-unders. So a
Re:Banner Ads Have Already Failed (Score:2)
Re:Banner Ads Have Already Failed (Score:2)
REALLY! Funny, google adwords requires you add to have a click through of at least
Can you back this number up?
Re:Banner Ads Have Already Failed (Score:2)
BIG difference between adwords & the typical banner ad.
Re:The choice is the consumer's (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The choice is the consumer's (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The choice is the consumer's (Score:4, Informative)
true (Score:2)
If anyone buys adspace on my site [osnippets.org], I might care. Until then, feel free to block them. I don't see any ads in Linux, OpenBSD, etc. VIM's "poor children in uganda" ad probably isn't paying any bills. We don't make this stuff for money, we make it to ease karma for all the free software we use. The web needs to figure out a simila
Re:The choice is the consumer's (Score:2)
The systems are created to ensure the largest amount of customer retention possible, and so are by design biased in favor of the publisher. Hiding behind the "they knew what they were getting into when they bought it" defense only works when they custome
Re:The choice is the consumer's (Score:3, Insightful)
Ads aren't content. Ads are anti-content. Ad-blocking software isn't censorship, its a feature for increasing the signal to noise ratio.
To anyone who isn't trying to sell me something I don't want, this is extremely obvious.
Re:The choice is the consumer's (Score:5, Insightful)
I see your point, but I think there is a difference here. In my opinion popups are a blatent hi-jacking of a computer system, by abusing a browser function that should not be there in the first place. Banner ads are part of the composition of the page you are viewing, and the author of the page should have the right to put them there.
That said, I feel I should have the right to interpret the HTML generated any way I choose. I should be able to view any, some, or all images, as I'm the one who has to download them.
Re:The choice is the consumer's (Score:4, Insightful)
I con't particularly care for banner ads but if I installed an anti-virus program and it started modifying my browsing capabilities without my consent, I'd be quite irrate.
Re:The choice is the consumer's (Score:3, Insightful)
What companies are failing to realize is that you have NO RIGHTS on the Internet. If users want to block banner ads, there isn't a thing you can do about it.
How about persuing a REAL business model instead?
Re:The choice is the consumer's (Score:3, Flamebait)
What users are failing to realize is that you have NO RIGHTS on the Internet. If companies want to block all user agents from their sites except for MSIE 6.x on Windows XP, there isn't a thing you can do about it.
When the shoe is on the other foot, does it still fit?
Bastard Web Designer's workaround (Score:4, Insightful)
If I were a Bastard Web Designer, I would respond to this trend by building my sites in Flash, with HTML used only as a bare-bones wrapper for delivering the Flash files.
Content and advertising would be so deeply integrated that it would be IMPOSSIBLE to view one without the other (or at least much much more difficult).
Take that, Slashjerks! And remember, to the average user, the bells and whistles of Flash are a GOOD thing, not a bad thing.
Re:Bastard Web Designer's workaround (Score:3, Insightful)
Go right on ahead. The chances of your website being the only one with what I'm looking for are practically zero. I'll just move on the the next one.
Re:Bastard Web Designer's workaround (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The choice is the consumer's (Score:3, Insightful)
When the shoe is on the other foot, does it still fit?
Wanna bet?
Your scenario would last for about 2 days, before someone hacked Mozilla so that it appeared to be IE6.
The choice is the SITE owner's: countermeasures (Score:5, Interesting)
1. convert more content into images and host them offsite -- the site becomes unusable if external images are hidden
2. host ad images and scripts locally so they don't look like ad content
3. use a registration and login processes that do not work when ad-blockers are enabled
4. obscure ad-keywords or convert them to local images
5. use scripts to compute external ad-related link addresses
6. charge for all content
7. go out of business
Re:huh? (Score:2)
Would you feel the same way if he started charging for his content because the ads were not bringing in any revenue?
Re:Blocking ads is bad news (Score:2)
Sorry, but unless you change the way that HTTP works, you can't force people to download content they don't want. The Internet is a pull, not a push medium, unlike TV, you can't edit out stuff in real time. ( You can with TVIO, but it's delayed) With the web, you can choose to download or not download images.
Remember back in the old days when browsers had the feature to onl
Re:DMCA (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, right. Then you can sue anyone using lynx or a VT100 terminal! Also, sue anyone with a computer incapable of displaying more than 256 colors, since clearly that has altered the intended true color look of the site. You used Mozilla??? Sue!!! That site c