Yes, surfing has become unimaginable without one for me. And for the ads that didn't get removed by AdBlock like the Vevo skin around music videos on Youtube's VEVO channels, I made my own: http://www.bitfalls.com/2012/11/deskin-hide-vevo-ads-from-yo...
Adblocker is one of the first things I installed for my mother on her new computer. For me seeing ads is an annoyance, but for her it's a real problem. She can't instantly distinguish adverts from content - particularly things like Adsense.
How is one unable to distinguish ads from content? Even without the visual cues of div separation and "Ads By ____" inset, there's a huge difference between the following:
"The history of knitting, yarns, and crochet"
"Thousands of Knitting Yarns FREE! Get quick and easy patterns today!"
Completely agree with this usage. If I didn't install an adblocker on my mothers computer she'd have 14 extra toolbars installed in her browser, 3 different virus scanners running and be out of pocket every month for some service she's been convinced she needs.
It would be good if there was an option to allow for "Parent friendly Ads".
I don't mind ads. What I have a problem with is animated graphics, autoplaying videos, and pop-ups. Blocking Flash mostly stops this for me, but as HTML5 becomes more popular, I worry that I will lose the ability to stop these kinds of behaviors.
I actually unintentionally started using one by installing Ghostery. I was under the impression that it was just for blocking invisible beacons, like buttons, that sort of thing, but it also took care of virtually all normal display ads. The effect was surprisingly nice, so I've left it enabled.
I don't, as a web developer/marketer I feel it is important to see what others are doing. I barely notice them, the sites where I do are typically dev related and potentially of interest to me.
Yes. I'm excited about the future of ads, actually, as Adblock Plus takes off with their new "only block evil ads" approach. A web where nobody feels the need to block ads because the only ads are innocuous and clean is a web we can dream to achieve.
Well, sort of. I don't use an ad blocker, but I do block some ads.
So far, my ad-blocking has been limited to placing a short list of domains in /etc/hosts. My main motivation was not the ads themselves, but rather delays in page-rendering caused by slow ad servers.
One of these days, I may get serious. The ads are getting more intrusive ... pop-over pages, videos that start playing audio automatically ...
I recently turned off AdBlock "just to see" for a few weeks. Maybe I had completely forgotten how bad online ads were but a few things really bothered me. I would get ads for shopping sites in my recent history (while browsing a totally unrelated site) that showed me items related to searches on said shopping website. A few times the ad would show me exact search results. Also it's unnerving seeing my Facebook profile pic right next to an empty comment field.
Working in web development as a UI/UX/front-end coding guy, I make a point out of not installing pop-up/add blockers.
Along with a big portion of power-users, I "suffer" from ad-blindness, so ads don't bug me that much regardless.
The ads that do bug me (generally ads with sound enabled or inappropriate ones), cause me to lodge complaints to sites that show them (if I like said site) or otherwise make me avoid that site in the future.
The reason I don't let a pop-up blocker take care of it all, is that I feel it's my responsibility to improve the web. To do that, I need to know what pains people, but also want to see what ads actually do work. That latter one is very rare though.
Yes, I use Disconnect for all social media (no, as a male, I don't want to accidentally hit the Like button on a page for buying bulk Midol for my girlfriend).
I also use AdBlock, but unblock certain sites that I like, have unobtrusive ads, and need the ad revenue (TechCrunch, Ars, IconPaper, and about two handfuls of others).
I recently switched to FF to start using Pentadactyl. In the process I ended up installing a few things here and there to make things feel just a tad more private, including Adblock Plus. I made a point to disable it on a number of sites I visit regularly with unobtrusive ads and will occasionally flick it off/on to make sure it's not introducing any layout issues or accidentally hiding content.
I don't use an Adblocker, but I did recently disable plugins by default because I was getting some massive performance issues from Flash (Chrome on Ubuntu 12.10).
It has massively improved my browsing experience having grey place-holder boxes where mostly ads were before.
I run Opera, which has a built-in content blocker. As a rule, I don't block ads because they're a revenue source for many sites and I consider them the cost of admission. If I consider the annoyance a fair exchange for the content then I'll accept the ads, and if I don't think the content is worth the ads then I won't use the site.
I will disable particular ads on a case-by-case basis that I consider pathologically aggravating (less than 1%), or when they disrupt page functionality. I also block several types of tracking functions that can aggregate an identity across multiple domains (I find no privacy issues with first-party analytics).
In the special case of floating overlays, I am a strange, strange person. I will not click on the close button, because I don't like clicking on an ad, even to close it. Instead, I will fire up the debugger and delete the ad from the DOM.
"In the special case of floating overlays, I am a strange, strange person. I will not click on the close button, because I don't like clicking on an ad, even to close it. Instead, I will fire up the debugger and delete the ad from the DOM."
That's actually completely understandable, because in many pop-up ads closing it triggers something else, or something that appears to be a close button actually isn't, and so on and so forth. I find these ads to be the most intrusive and annoying.
I use Adblock Plus, but I really need to start looking for a new adblocker, because Adblock Plus has started adding various anti-features like an on-by-default ad whitelist and a horribly broken domain "typo correction" mechanism. These annoyances add extra prompts and configuration work needed at installation time, and make it more difficult to maintain unobtrusive Adblock Plus installations for non-technical users.
Hell yeah i use an Adblocker, and i love having an outgoing firewall on my jailbroken ios devices -- I explicitly block all applications from contacting the advertising providers.
Advertising is evil and I will have no part of it. I don't care if your business model is advertising, you wont make a dime out of me.
I use an adblocker for everything. I do try to buy stuff from the stores of websites that I like to support them and encourage a revenue model that does not annoy me.
Instead of slapping ads around the side of your page that can be blocked, you bust some holes in the Chinese wall and let advertising become involved in the narrative. There are tasteful and tasteless ways to do this (Monocle gets it right - http://www.psfk.com/2009/06/monocle-xs-brands-v-agencies.htm...) but you can choose new sources if you don't like what they do.
It's not an entirely new concept though. TV has been riddled with "integrated" content-based advertising for decades. Oprah doesn't just invite that famous author on to plug their book because they're friends.. ;-)
1004 days ago I was a lot more pessimistic about this trend on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172595 (Yes, I track too many links.) But I'm now somewhat supportive of the move as long as publications do it carefully and focus on the content above all else.
Can you point to any current examples online? I'm not quite sure what this would look like. I know in the UK it's obligatory for an advertisement to be identified as such.
The issue is it can be hard to tell if it's happening and in cases where it's not disclosed, I could be committing libel by suggesting it is. However, keep a particular eye open for where companies "partner" with publications to write articles or "sponsor" entire columns. The identification can be quite subtle and totally avoided in the main content.
Picking on Monocle in the print world again though, the New York Times had a great analysis of the way Monocle applies the idea: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/business/media/24carr.html... .. the model (and attitude) explained in this article is something I expect to see become very prevalent online.
I'm not UK media trained but to the best of my knowledge, the Advertising Standards Authority has no power to force publishers to meet its demands. What can happen, though, is publishers can be sued under the Unfair Trading Regulations Act for "misleading omissions" (an act that applies to all business activities and can be very broadly interpreted) specifically when a commercial practice "fails to identify its commercial intent, unless this is already apparent from the context".
Context is tricky though. If a publication is particularly vocal about its practices, I suspect it would be hard to get to court. Another related context is when newspapers are paid to give away freebies that are not marked as advertising but the context is clearly of an advertising nature.
Sorry for the disjointed bundle of ideas here but I've just seen how much time I've spent so far. I think this is a fascinating area though and one I much enjoy observing mostly (but not entirely) as an outsider.
..
Update: I did some more digging into this because I know it happens and I know it's not always disclosed.. and think I have found the loophole - http://www.out-law.com/page-4853
Specifically, the ASA code states:
"Advertisement features, announcements or promotions, sometimes referred to as 'advertorials', that are disseminated in exchange for a payment or other reciprocal arrangement should comply with the Code if their content is controlled by the marketers rather than the publishers."
So content produced by a publisher on behalf of an advertiser for pay may still be an advertorial but seem to have some sort of exemption under UK standards. This would explain a lot of magazines I know do this stuff.
Tweepi's Top 10 list of Twitter utilities includes Tweepi itself. Lot's of other companies are doing this too, that was just the quickest example I could find. They generate content that could have value, but also insert self-promotional stuff in there.
That's really "content marketing." Similar, but not quite the same.
The trend I'm referring to is when independent publications produce content that's bankrolled (but not supplied) by advertisers. Content marketing is the same concept but done by the advertisers directly.
The example that comes to mind is content that IS advertisement. For that you can look into just about any US magazine (not sure about UK, but I suspect they are very similar there), for example this article in GQ http://www.gq.com/food-travel/restaurants-and-bars/201211/fo.... In this instance, they are making recommendations to you from a position of authority, even though it comes from a position of selling ad space and delivering the ads as content. If you go to slide 3, you will see peppermint bark stuff "for the chocolate connoisseur", which is about as far as away from a chocolate connoisseur as I can think of, conveniently with a price right there.
Another good example is celebrity magazines that just happen to drop the name of a designer that a particular celebrity is wearing.
Keep in mind, I use adblock (edit: and noscript and ghostery) and these adverts still come up.
You got it. And my main observation (or hunch, to be safe!) is advertising "blindness", whether psychological or technological, has encouraged and will continue to encourage this form of advertising.
I don't disagree, but there's another side to this. It's happened in print for years - a review in June, a double page spread ad in July.
But it damages editorial integrity and it dilutes genuine content. In print this doesn't really matter - there are huge barriers to entry, and newcomers are more likely than anyone to do it to make it easier to score revenue.
Online though, if I suspect that [blognamehere] are plugging something shit for profit I'll just go elsewhere for my news. It doesn't cost me a penny, and there are infinite other options.
Great point. Once you buy the magazine, the money is spent, whether you like it or not. Although, it should encourage you to not buy anymore.
On the flip side, printed magazines would be so prohibitively expensive without adverts that nobody would buy them, so I guess in print it's a balancing act between alienating users via too many ads or cost of the magazine.
I was using an adblocker until a SaaS provider that shall not be named asked me to stop using it so their product could work correctly, the internet has sucked since then.
Adblocker? No. Flashblocker? Yes. If advertisers start to rely heavily on JS-based animation to get my attention, I can't guarantee that I'll be able to support the websites that carry their advertising.
73 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] thread"The history of knitting, yarns, and crochet"
"Thousands of Knitting Yarns FREE! Get quick and easy patterns today!"
It would be good if there was an option to allow for "Parent friendly Ads".
Well, sort of. I don't use an ad blocker, but I do block some ads.
So far, my ad-blocking has been limited to placing a short list of domains in /etc/hosts. My main motivation was not the ads themselves, but rather delays in page-rendering caused by slow ad servers.
One of these days, I may get serious. The ads are getting more intrusive ... pop-over pages, videos that start playing audio automatically ...
AdBlock is back on.
Along with a big portion of power-users, I "suffer" from ad-blindness, so ads don't bug me that much regardless.
The ads that do bug me (generally ads with sound enabled or inappropriate ones), cause me to lodge complaints to sites that show them (if I like said site) or otherwise make me avoid that site in the future.
The reason I don't let a pop-up blocker take care of it all, is that I feel it's my responsibility to improve the web. To do that, I need to know what pains people, but also want to see what ads actually do work. That latter one is very rare though.
I also use AdBlock, but unblock certain sites that I like, have unobtrusive ads, and need the ad revenue (TechCrunch, Ars, IconPaper, and about two handfuls of others).
It has massively improved my browsing experience having grey place-holder boxes where mostly ads were before.
I will disable particular ads on a case-by-case basis that I consider pathologically aggravating (less than 1%), or when they disrupt page functionality. I also block several types of tracking functions that can aggregate an identity across multiple domains (I find no privacy issues with first-party analytics).
In the special case of floating overlays, I am a strange, strange person. I will not click on the close button, because I don't like clicking on an ad, even to close it. Instead, I will fire up the debugger and delete the ad from the DOM.
That's actually completely understandable, because in many pop-up ads closing it triggers something else, or something that appears to be a close button actually isn't, and so on and so forth. I find these ads to be the most intrusive and annoying.
Advertising is evil and I will have no part of it. I don't care if your business model is advertising, you wont make a dime out of me.
Instead of slapping ads around the side of your page that can be blocked, you bust some holes in the Chinese wall and let advertising become involved in the narrative. There are tasteful and tasteless ways to do this (Monocle gets it right - http://www.psfk.com/2009/06/monocle-xs-brands-v-agencies.htm...) but you can choose new sources if you don't like what they do.
It's not an entirely new concept though. TV has been riddled with "integrated" content-based advertising for decades. Oprah doesn't just invite that famous author on to plug their book because they're friends.. ;-)
1004 days ago I was a lot more pessimistic about this trend on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172595 (Yes, I track too many links.) But I'm now somewhat supportive of the move as long as publications do it carefully and focus on the content above all else.
Picking on Monocle in the print world again though, the New York Times had a great analysis of the way Monocle applies the idea: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/business/media/24carr.html... .. the model (and attitude) explained in this article is something I expect to see become very prevalent online.
I'm not UK media trained but to the best of my knowledge, the Advertising Standards Authority has no power to force publishers to meet its demands. What can happen, though, is publishers can be sued under the Unfair Trading Regulations Act for "misleading omissions" (an act that applies to all business activities and can be very broadly interpreted) specifically when a commercial practice "fails to identify its commercial intent, unless this is already apparent from the context".
Context is tricky though. If a publication is particularly vocal about its practices, I suspect it would be hard to get to court. Another related context is when newspapers are paid to give away freebies that are not marked as advertising but the context is clearly of an advertising nature.
Sorry for the disjointed bundle of ideas here but I've just seen how much time I've spent so far. I think this is a fascinating area though and one I much enjoy observing mostly (but not entirely) as an outsider.
..
Update: I did some more digging into this because I know it happens and I know it's not always disclosed.. and think I have found the loophole - http://www.out-law.com/page-4853
Specifically, the ASA code states:
"Advertisement features, announcements or promotions, sometimes referred to as 'advertorials', that are disseminated in exchange for a payment or other reciprocal arrangement should comply with the Code if their content is controlled by the marketers rather than the publishers."
So content produced by a publisher on behalf of an advertiser for pay may still be an advertorial but seem to have some sort of exemption under UK standards. This would explain a lot of magazines I know do this stuff.
Tweepi's Top 10 list of Twitter utilities includes Tweepi itself. Lot's of other companies are doing this too, that was just the quickest example I could find. They generate content that could have value, but also insert self-promotional stuff in there.
The trend I'm referring to is when independent publications produce content that's bankrolled (but not supplied) by advertisers. Content marketing is the same concept but done by the advertisers directly.
Another good example is celebrity magazines that just happen to drop the name of a designer that a particular celebrity is wearing.
Keep in mind, I use adblock (edit: and noscript and ghostery) and these adverts still come up.
But it damages editorial integrity and it dilutes genuine content. In print this doesn't really matter - there are huge barriers to entry, and newcomers are more likely than anyone to do it to make it easier to score revenue.
Online though, if I suspect that [blognamehere] are plugging something shit for profit I'll just go elsewhere for my news. It doesn't cost me a penny, and there are infinite other options.
On the flip side, printed magazines would be so prohibitively expensive without adverts that nobody would buy them, so I guess in print it's a balancing act between alienating users via too many ads or cost of the magazine.