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Web Ads with Sound? 49

Posted by Cliff from the what-annoying-thing-will-they-think-of-next dept.
Mina asks: "Just noticed that some sites, About.com in particular, started piping sound adds in their pages - one in particular (the Harry Potter themed CocaCola subsidized reading campaign from Reading is Fundamental). This isn't something that can easily be turned off - unlike popups, they can't just be clicked on or elminated by a nifty browser plugin. I'm interested in seeing how the Slashdot community deals with the new, more annoying ads that the more desperate companies are implementing now. Do you just live with them? Are there even niftier plugins to the browsers that I'm just not aware of?" And you thought pop-ups were the worst, now you can get sudden and annoying sounds played as well. Maybe browsers will have volume sliders bundled with them in the near future. God, I hope not, but if such ads become commonplace, it may be a good idea.
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Web Ads with Sound? More

Web Ads with Sound?

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    1. Turn the volume to 0
    2. Play music instead (if you've got one of those sound cards that only plays one thing at a time)
    3. Look at the server that the sound object comes from (like an IMG tag has SRC) and block it - put it in your firewall rules, make it resolve to 127.0.0.1 in resolv.conf or hosts.ini, or add it to your junkbuster rules, whatever.
  • I personally do such things to prevent these ads by firewalling out every IP block belonging to ad agencies. Most people don't host their own ads, and there for you can do this without killing your normal content.

  • Konqueror (Score:2, Interesting)

    by FroMan ( 111520 )
    Well, Konqueror already allows for certain sites for cookies. Why not just add the same feature for music? Seems like a really simple fix to me. One of the best things the Konqueror team does is add really cool things to avoid annoying things like this.
  • It bothers me that rather than coming up with creative and interesting ways to target advertisements to certain groups, interesting ways to add value while serving ads, etc, inif* these marketing droids would rather have your computer become a TV that just happens to be connected to the internet.
    I hope the online community is strong enough to stave off the "dumbing down" of the internet.

    -- MetaCosm
    P.S. This posting made after being up all night without sleep, trying to hunt down one bug, and generally being grumpy, take it with a grain of salt, and PLEASE ignore spelling and "grammah" :)
    • It bothers me that rather than coming up with creative and interesting ways to target advertisements to certain groups, interesting ways to add value while serving ads, etc, inif* these marketing droids would rather have your computer become a TV that just happens to be connected to the internet. I hope the online community is strong enough to stave off the "dumbing down" of the internet.

      For alot of people, that is what the home computer is. It is yet another appliance that is used for entertainment. Not everybody out there is a creative genious. Many people are only consumers.

  • ... with lynx ! ;)

  • Use a better browser (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IE 6 allows you to turn off sounds in web pages, kill dancing baloney, manage trust relationships with websites & control cookies with fine granularity.
    Considering most of the users of slashdot are running some flavor of IE, I would anticipate this is the answer to your question.
    • IE 6 allows you to turn off sounds in web pages, kill dancing baloney, manage trust relationships with websites & control cookies with fine granularity.

      This doesn't stop Shockwave, etc from making sound. The audio settings only affect the standard html and javascript-controlled sound. You'd have to remove all your plugins to stop the sounds in IE.

  • What are these banner ads you speak of? I do not believe I have ever seen one [junkbuster.com].
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The problem with that is most sites use as an ad service. You'll see the anoying ads wherever you go.
    • Also, Lynx was mentioned a bit further up. That's a really good way to avoid multimedia advertisements.

      Yes, Lynx is a good way to avoid multimedia advertisements, as well as a lot of worthwile content. Thats like saying you should stop driving your red sprotscar and get a Geo, because youre less likely to get a ticket...sure it's more or less true, but its about the tradeoff and what you think is valuable enough to wade through ads to get at. Face it, not many sites get designed with the Lynx user in mind anymore.
  • What you need is a browser firewall, so programs can't access devices (like speakers) without your permission. IE is trying to play a sound file, is this OK? Yes, No, Cancel This could be a neat features for the next windows release (WinRG)
  • 1. Block sounds from this site
    2. Block Flash plugins from this site

    Starting to seem better and better every day.
    • appologies for the trollishness, but....

      doesn't mozilla allready block flash plugins?

      (i couldn't get mozilla/linux to work with any flash plugins available on macromedia.com... it tried to work, but instead of running flash, it crashed mozilla)

      • doesn't mozilla allready block flash plugins?

        (i couldn't get mozilla/linux to work with any flash plugins available on macromedia.com... it tried to work, but instead of running flash, it crashed mozilla)

        This is strange, because I have never used a version of Mozilla that would not cooperate with the Flash plugin =)

        (There's one thing to note: The plugin should be installed to *global* plugin directory, *not* to ~/.mozilla/.../plugins.)

        (Oh yeah, an on-topic comment that's probably -10 redundant: Jungbuster rocks, and Mozilla's security policy settings can easily kill all pop-ups/pop-unders dead if so desired.)

  • lynx (Score:1)

    by kireK ( 254264 )
    Simple.... surf with lynx. No annoying pop-ups, no sounds, no flash adds dancing across your screen.

    Ohh.... you WANT the pretty graphics! You like the cool mouse overs.... Then move to Windoze and run IE.
    • I wonder, how many of this people who suggest using lynx actually use it themselves? Let me spell it out, lynx is crap. There's better choises like w3m and links.
  • Filter 'em [webwasher.com].

    Problem solved.


  • Has anyone seen the ads that come up in the middle of the page you are trying to view? I believe it's an image in another layer that they put on top of the page for n seconds and then it fades away.

    I think those only work on IE since I haven't seen it happen on Netscape or Mozilla yet.

    With the popups, sounds, flashing banners, and these images I'm really missing gopher :)

  • I started doing this when people started with MIDI (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2001 @11:33AM (#2558362)
    Run your browser as a different user that doesn't have permissions to /dev/dsp

    That way you can keep using all your sound generating apps without your browser butting in.

    Unfortuantly all you windows users can't do this...
  • I don't got one. I can't stand computers making noise at me.
  • Can't be any worse than those site authors which seem to think a shite midi rendition of Britney will enhance my eXPerience.
  • If a tree falls in the woods and noone has a sound card, does it make a sound?

    You can always disable your sound plugins. Unless you are going to download a movie they really should not be doing that. I know that when I worked at a web portol we had strick guidlines about sound on the site. If it existed it should play only once and the user should be able to disable the sound. If this site does not do that I'd like to know what the name of the sites that are doing this are and then I can avoid them, which is what I'd really suggest you'd do unless there is something that you MUST have from that site and cannot get elsewhere.

  • Get the Proxomitron here: http://www.computerstuff.net/prox/ [computerstuff.net]

    Not only will it block all conventional banner ads and popups, it also does useful things with respect to stopping embedded multimedia. By default stuff like flash, embedded quicktime, embedded midi's or wav files, etc are all filtered out and a link to them is inserted in their place so if it is ever something you actually want to view you just click the link and it loads.

    Works flawlessly... no aggravating floating flash ads at IGN, makes it easier to save embedded videos (right click on the link, save as), and I haven't seen a popup since I installed it.
    • It's for windows, but it runs fine with wine. I heard that it might crash if you configure it with it's gui, but if that happens you can just edit the config files with [insert fav editor here]. I haven't had any problems with it myself.
  • Why do sites/advertisers do intrusive advertising like this in the first place?
    Do they think the internet is a TV or something?

    I for one like the text based ads on other sites more so than the picture based ones. Namely
    because I can get information about the product/site w/o visiting it first, this sounds
    counter productive to what ads try to do (generate hits to websites) but I normally go to websites
    I wouldn't normally with a picture ad with a text based ad.
    Maybe websites/advertisers should take a hint.
  • I use TVGuide.com all the time and recently the banners have been changed to very annoying flash banners that turn on when you accidently mouseover them (they also expand to fill most of the friggin' screen).

    Example URL: http://www.tvguide.com/Listings/index.asp?I=61286& Zip=92627

    It should be the Michael Jackson banner :o

    They also designed to the interface so that 99% of the time you will accidently mouseover it while navigating the different times and start the ad sounds.

  • Uh-oh (Score:1)

    by tunah ( 530328 )
    Maybe browsers will have volume sliders bundled with them in the near future.

    Yes! And they will be scriptable!

  • The ad serving party (ie, the ad network serving the ad) will do nothing about complaints. They are getting paid money to show the ad, and unless you're willing to offer them more, they will likely show up at work in the morning, read your email, and snicker.

    So email the actual company advertising .. and everyone that actually cares, DO IT! Companies, contrary to popular belief, are fairly sensitive to feedback from marketing campaigns.
  • My firewall is equiped with a http proxy server which has the hability to filter url. Check WWWOFFLE [freshmeat.net] (on freshmeat) or directly the homesite [demon.co.uk].
    Once you've found the correct url to use in the filters, the majority of the ads you had been seeing will disappear. You'll be surfing 95% ads free! You can also filter headers transmitted to and from the server (cookies, browser version, ...)

    My results so far are:

    • Arround 90% of the ads filtered
    • Popup and popunder filtered: don't even open if called by external js, otherwise content filtered.
    • Some "brand toolbars" wiped (xoom and nbci when they existed, netscape, freeservers, lycos)
    • No watermark or ads of any sort on Geocities (for all sites)
    • External stats/counters sites filtered (mainly those adding ads to the counter)
    • ...
    There are some other programs doing the same thing. You should be able to find one that fulfills your needs.
  • about.com is horrible. I used to work co-op for them back when they were miningco. They require webmasters to prefix all links with a miningco address to show the link inside a frame of their page.

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