7 ms·

An approach to fair ad blocking

68 points by haasted 17y ago

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
axod 17y ago
>> "A webmaster should insert this tag into his pages if he thinks that the ads used on his site aren’t intrusive. " 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.
- Angostura 17y ago
  That is the Web's default. It's users that make the conscious decision to over-ride the fault by installin AdBlock. FWIW, I never block ads because I'm happy to have free content and pay an ad tax.
Ardit20 17y ago
As I stated many times before, my goal with Adblock Plus isn’t to destroy the advertising industry. 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.
- axod 17y ago
  It's quite simple to detect and block only adblock users if you wish. It's about 6% of firefox users on my webapp. Or you could show them "Donate here if you're not prepared to see my ads" links everywhere.
  - Ardit20 17y ago
    How do you do so? I am not a programmer although have some experience of it, just a curious guy who happened to stubble upon this place with people which seem at least able to share a love for umm 'thinking' :P . I do not plan to implement a blocking of them guys, as I said fair to them, they have the knowledge and are not quite a threatening statistics. I'll save the time load for this thing I am trying to figure out of how to automate the change of the most viewed articles.
    - axod 17y ago
      Simple method would be to try and load content from often blocked domains and see if it loads properly or not using js. I did this a while ago and measured the 6% firefox users using adblock. 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); } This works because adblock is pretty primitive and just checks for keywords in the iframe src, and if there sets the visibility or display css style etc. 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.
      - dsingleton 17y ago
        There was some discussion on Reddit recently about ABP usage figures (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8j4c7/we_created_a_plugin_for_jquery_jplayer_that/c09gqbb http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8j4c7/we_create...). My rough estimations came out at 6% of FF users having ABP installed, sounds like that was about right. Out of curiosity, what kind of audience does your site have? Particularly tech savvy?
windsurfer 17y ago
Mice want cheese. If you put a mouse at the start a maze, and cheese at the end of it, a mouse will likely go through a maze to get the cheese. It will likely pay attention to the maze to try to figure out how to get through faster next time. But if the mouse can figure out how to get around the maze, maybe by climbing over a wall, don't be surprised or angry. The mouse doesn't like the maze at all; it's just an obstacle. The mouse just wants the cheese, not the maze. 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 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.
- axod 17y ago
  Most people don't think like this. People click on ads every day. millions of clicks. That doesn't help them get the cheese, it helps them find out about new cool products they didn't know about. Those adverts are useful to them. They are glad to have adverts. 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.
huhtenberg 17y ago
His suggestion makes certain sense, but ... 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.
jrockway 17y ago
The day they add this feature and enable it by default is the day I fork ABP and distribute it without that feature. Yup, I know this is "stealing". I don't care.
- axod 17y ago
  I like the fact most websites are free. 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.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    "Delete domain cookies." 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.
    - axod 17y ago
      What if you had to register with 100 websites?
      - jrockway 17y ago
        What if the Earth exploded and everyone died?
        axod 17y ago
        yeah I think my scenario is slightly more probable.
  - taw 17y ago
    BugMeNot works on some walled gardens like nytimes. If that fails, mailinator works on some more (but not all again).
- 17y ago
raquo 17y ago
If this feature becomes popular among webmasters (it should, as many use only Adsense which is usually far from intrusive), it will become annoying for the user. 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.
hollerith 17y ago
I will not tolerate ads, but will pay money to be able to access certain web sites. I see the purpose of Adblock Plus as being to force site owners to provide an alternative (e.g., subscriptions, micropayments, whatever) to ads for people like me. So, the way I would like Adblock Plus to restore the balance to be more fair to site owners is to refrain from blocking ads on sites that give the surfer some practical way to contribute to the cost of the web site without being exposed to ads.
- axod 17y ago
  They'll more likely ignore you, notice their CPM is low, and make the ads more intrusive for the rest. Well done you. If a site is using intrusive or irritating advertising, don't visit it.
  - narag 17y ago
    If sites ignore individual users' behaviour, wouldn't it be naive to do something expecting to change their advertising patterns? OTOH, if blockers are such a tiny minority, why are you so concerned?
    - lucumo 17y ago
      > OTOH, if blockers are such a tiny minority, why are you so concerned? I'm concerned by the general decline of morality online.
  - enneff 17y ago
    Why should I stop? I'm not losing anything. Just because you other suckers want to view ads doesn't mean I should.
    - griftah 17y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
ErrantX 17y ago
Theoretical question (loosely related) if it is ethical to remove adverts from "free" websites is it ethical for those websites to ban ABP users from the site? How far does that argument go? (I am not sure my position on it TBH, thought I would throw it out to you lot).
- jfarmer 17y ago
  I'd say "yes" to both questions. I should have control of my computer and how it displays data, and you should have control over whom you send that data to. Everything else is a cost/benefit analysis.
- paulgb 17y ago
  Sure, they pay the bandwidth bill, after all. I don't see any ethical issues with them banning users for whatever reason they want.
dejb 17y ago
All I've ever wanted from adblock was a 'Disable ads on this site' button. Maybe they could even make it social so a central list of blocked sites could be generated. 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.
VBprogrammer 17y ago
His proposal seems fair enough to me. But I don't use an ad-blocker. I vote with my feet as they say and don't revisit sites which have a poor signal to noise (useful content to annoying ad) ratio. I personally find those sites which have genuine annoying ads are those websites with a poorly aligned moral compass anyway!
enneff 17y ago
I honestly hope advertisting does die a horrible death. I liked the web a lot more before it was commercialised.
- tdm911 17y ago
  Unfortunately the web as we know it would largely not exist without advertising revenue. Think of all the free services we enjoy each day, they are all funded through advertising of some description. 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.
  - hollerith 17y ago
    Did you experience the internet before ads? If not, you might be surprised by how rich the experience was.
    - tdm911 17y ago
      I started using the web around 1995, so I guess that depends on what time period you are referring to. I certainly didn't use it before the first graphical browsers appeared! 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.
      - enneff 17y ago
        Flickr does exist on subscriptions only.
  - enneff 17y ago
    "Unfortunately the web as we know it would largely not exist without advertising revenue." 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.
snprbob86 17y ago
Why not put algorithmic constraints on what is an acceptable ad? 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.
deno 17y ago
Hi Hacker News! (my 1st comment here ;)) How about this solution: Make AdBlock to think more. Now it's every ad or no ads situation. How about middle ground? AdBlock would block only very irritating ads, these ads that tend to pop up on screen, animated ads (you can "deanimate" them, privoxy already implement this) and very big ads. Maybe we can have some way measure how much of advertisements given page contains? If site has 50% of ads we can reduce them to half of it. Also, adding something like <img adblockpriority="(0-6)"/> might help. So, what do you think?

68 points by haasted 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

axod 17y ago

>> "A webmaster should insert this tag into his pages if he thinks that the ads used on his site aren’t intrusive. " 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.

Angostura 17y ago
That is the Web's default. It's users that make the conscious decision to over-ride the fault by installin AdBlock. FWIW, I never block ads because I'm happy to have free content and pay an ad tax.

Ardit20 17y ago

As I stated many times before, my goal with Adblock Plus isn’t to destroy the advertising industry. 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.

axod 17y ago
It's quite simple to detect and block only adblock users if you wish. It's about 6% of firefox users on my webapp. Or you could show them "Donate here if you're not prepared to see my ads" links everywhere.
- Ardit20 17y ago
  How do you do so? I am not a programmer although have some experience of it, just a curious guy who happened to stubble upon this place with people which seem at least able to share a love for umm 'thinking' :P . I do not plan to implement a blocking of them guys, as I said fair to them, they have the knowledge and are not quite a threatening statistics. I'll save the time load for this thing I am trying to figure out of how to automate the change of the most viewed articles.
  - axod 17y ago
    Simple method would be to try and load content from often blocked domains and see if it loads properly or not using js. I did this a while ago and measured the 6% firefox users using adblock. 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); } This works because adblock is pretty primitive and just checks for keywords in the iframe src, and if there sets the visibility or display css style etc. 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.
    - dsingleton 17y ago
      There was some discussion on Reddit recently about ABP usage figures (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8j4c7/we_created_a_plugin_for_jquery_jplayer_that/c09gqbb http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8j4c7/we_create...). My rough estimations came out at 6% of FF users having ABP installed, sounds like that was about right. Out of curiosity, what kind of audience does your site have? Particularly tech savvy?

windsurfer 17y ago

Mice want cheese. If you put a mouse at the start a maze, and cheese at the end of it, a mouse will likely go through a maze to get the cheese. It will likely pay attention to the maze to try to figure out how to get through faster next time. But if the mouse can figure out how to get around the maze, maybe by climbing over a wall, don't be surprised or angry. The mouse doesn't like the maze at all; it's just an obstacle. The mouse just wants the cheese, not the maze. 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 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.

axod 17y ago
Most people don't think like this. People click on ads every day. millions of clicks. That doesn't help them get the cheese, it helps them find out about new cool products they didn't know about. Those adverts are useful to them. They are glad to have adverts. 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.

huhtenberg 17y ago

His suggestion makes certain sense, but ... 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.

jrockway 17y ago

The day they add this feature and enable it by default is the day I fork ABP and distribute it without that feature. Yup, I know this is "stealing". I don't care.

axod 17y ago
I like the fact most websites are free. 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.
- jrockway 17y ago
  "Delete domain cookies." 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.
  - axod 17y ago
    What if you had to register with 100 websites?
    - jrockway 17y ago
      What if the Earth exploded and everyone died?
      - axod 17y ago
        yeah I think my scenario is slightly more probable.
- taw 17y ago
  BugMeNot works on some walled gardens like nytimes. If that fails, mailinator works on some more (but not all again).
17y ago

raquo 17y ago

If this feature becomes popular among webmasters (it should, as many use only Adsense which is usually far from intrusive), it will become annoying for the user. 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.

hollerith 17y ago

I will not tolerate ads, but will pay money to be able to access certain web sites. I see the purpose of Adblock Plus as being to force site owners to provide an alternative (e.g., subscriptions, micropayments, whatever) to ads for people like me. So, the way I would like Adblock Plus to restore the balance to be more fair to site owners is to refrain from blocking ads on sites that give the surfer some practical way to contribute to the cost of the web site without being exposed to ads.

axod 17y ago
They'll more likely ignore you, notice their CPM is low, and make the ads more intrusive for the rest. Well done you. If a site is using intrusive or irritating advertising, don't visit it.
- narag 17y ago
  If sites ignore individual users' behaviour, wouldn't it be naive to do something expecting to change their advertising patterns? OTOH, if blockers are such a tiny minority, why are you so concerned?
  - lucumo 17y ago
    > OTOH, if blockers are such a tiny minority, why are you so concerned? I'm concerned by the general decline of morality online.
- enneff 17y ago
  Why should I stop? I'm not losing anything. Just because you other suckers want to view ads doesn't mean I should.
  - griftah 17y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

ErrantX 17y ago

Theoretical question (loosely related) if it is ethical to remove adverts from "free" websites is it ethical for those websites to ban ABP users from the site? How far does that argument go? (I am not sure my position on it TBH, thought I would throw it out to you lot).

jfarmer 17y ago
I'd say "yes" to both questions. I should have control of my computer and how it displays data, and you should have control over whom you send that data to. Everything else is a cost/benefit analysis.
paulgb 17y ago
Sure, they pay the bandwidth bill, after all. I don't see any ethical issues with them banning users for whatever reason they want.

dejb 17y ago

All I've ever wanted from adblock was a 'Disable ads on this site' button. Maybe they could even make it social so a central list of blocked sites could be generated. 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.

VBprogrammer 17y ago

His proposal seems fair enough to me. But I don't use an ad-blocker. I vote with my feet as they say and don't revisit sites which have a poor signal to noise (useful content to annoying ad) ratio. I personally find those sites which have genuine annoying ads are those websites with a poorly aligned moral compass anyway!

enneff 17y ago

I honestly hope advertisting does die a horrible death. I liked the web a lot more before it was commercialised.

tdm911 17y ago
Unfortunately the web as we know it would largely not exist without advertising revenue. Think of all the free services we enjoy each day, they are all funded through advertising of some description. 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.
- hollerith 17y ago
  Did you experience the internet before ads? If not, you might be surprised by how rich the experience was.
  - tdm911 17y ago
    I started using the web around 1995, so I guess that depends on what time period you are referring to. I certainly didn't use it before the first graphical browsers appeared! 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.
    - enneff 17y ago
      Flickr does exist on subscriptions only.
- enneff 17y ago
  "Unfortunately the web as we know it would largely not exist without advertising revenue." 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.

snprbob86 17y ago

Why not put algorithmic constraints on what is an acceptable ad? 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.

deno 17y ago

Hi Hacker News! (my 1st comment here ;)) How about this solution: Make AdBlock to think more. Now it's every ad or no ads situation. How about middle ground? AdBlock would block only very irritating ads, these ads that tend to pop up on screen, animated ads (you can "deanimate" them, privoxy already implement this) and very big ads. Maybe we can have some way measure how much of advertisements given page contains? If site has 50% of ads we can reduce them to half of it. Also, adding something like <img adblockpriority="(0-6)"/> might help. So, what do you think?