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
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.
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.
"Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000," the study said, and they "are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."
"heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks."
A lot of advertisers don't want to reach those people though. They want to get their brand in front of influential 20-somethings, not to get clicks, but to generate brand awareness.
Hypothetical: if I were to tell you that, say, 75% of the net ad revenue on many ad networks was generated by clicks on ads served by adware and spyware, but only, say, 15% of total ad impressions were served by adware and spyware, would you revise your reasoning as to how useful the clickers are finding the ads?
We're not discussing adware/spyware. And no, I wouldn't revise my thoughts. All you've said is the obvious - adware+spyware is very effective at generating revenue. Obviously more effective than unobtrusive advertising mingled in with website content.
edit: still not sure I quite understand your point here (Or why the downmods). You're saying that adware/spyware generates lots of revenue for ad networks. What does that have to do with the usefulness of advertising on websites?
Hypothesis A: ads are useful, people click on them b/c they deliberately want more info.
Hypothesis B: ads are useless, people click on them only when they are somehow tricked into doing so.
It's obviously the case that out of the set of ad-clickers some are type A and some are type B; the interesting question is the composition of the ad-clicking population.
What follows depends on how you interpret adware and spyware clicks: are they clicked mostly out of confusion (b/c the demographic that has adware/spyware-infected computers tends to be the elderly and other "unsavvy" people) or mostly b/c they're useful to the clicker?
Depending on how you do your weightings you might have to revise down the % of type-A clicks that're going on (and revise it down again to take various kinds of clickfraud into account).
I can't actually tell you if those stats are accurate: I've overheard figures like that from people who might know, but figure they're mostly disgruntled employees exaggerating for effect, so I tend to discount the testimony somewhat.
The thing is, the people clicking on the "Free Ipod Touch!!!" </blink> are genuinely interested in the result. They also may not understand the implication of such "FREEE!!!" offers.
Remember, the people seeing the adware are the ones who clicked on bonzai buddy in the first place, and/or don't realize the adware on their machine.
These are also the people that don't think there's going to have any trouble canceling that free offer.
(An aside: one of the darkest, most depressing times in my life was working in online advertising. I lasted 6 months.)
My evidence is mainly my own - I've made money off online advertising for 10 years now. I've never had to trick anyone into clicking on adverts. They do so because they find them useful.
Even if it's true that you haven't tricked people into clicking on them, without further evidence it's hard to say if your clicks are because people find them useful or because people get confused.
Many critics offer a better solution: Make the mice want to go through the maze.
Or, find the user when they are already looking for a maze to go through, and take advantage of that to entertain the user and get some brand placement at the same time. That feels like a better analogy to me; it's far easier to get a user to play your game when they're in a playful mood already. In this case, the maze is the cheese. :-)
Enticing people to go through mazes when they are not in the proper mindset is hard though, even when the maze is compelling and might be enticing given a different mindset. Your potential users need to find out about your toys somehow. I'm not totally familiar with how BK has been marketing these games, but if I'm not in the mood to play a game, no amount of enticing will work. There are a lot of times when I am searching for specific information, and even the most compelling offer of fun and engagement is just an annoying distraction.
I guess this is the long way of saying: make sure to engage them when they want a maze to go through, and make them want it to be your maze. Marketing works best when people want to be marketed to.
By nature only a small subset of ads will be engaging and fun. If all ads were "that good" then they'd all be equally mundane. Ads are an arms race for attention, it's not about being better, but better than the rest.
Is the engagement and fun of advertising really a zero sum game?
As a thought experiment, I can imagine sample groups of advertisements I've seen where even the best ad would garner my disgust, because it was so unbelievably obnoxious and engagement-free.
On the other hand though, given a sample group of effective advertisements, I could imagine being able to indicate the one I would be most likely to click on first. Now this doesn't mean the others aren't engaging and fun. It means the one I indicated is more engaging and fun than the rest, but it is possible they are much more engaging and fun than the former group of crap. At best, I might be compelled to go and visit each of them once I am done with the one before. By that standard, they would all be engaging and fun.
But then, I could be thinking about this wrong. Advertising generally works very poorly on me, and so I might not have the proper frame of reference.
However, I've found it generally true that a small subset of ads strike me as being engaging and fun to my hypothetical advertising consumer. However, I don't think this is a tautology as much as evidence that more effort and concern will make that subset grow larger.
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.
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.
I don't see how it's stealing.. You (as a web developer) don't have the power to require me to display any part of your HTML. Would it still be wrong to disable stylesheets on an obnoxiously coded page? I realize it's a bit different since ads (in theory) make money, but the principle is the same.
The thing is, the bit of difference is actually quite a big difference. It's the difference of helping yourself by not hurting others and helping yourself by hurting someone else.
It's the difference between reading a newspaper you found on the street and reading it over a stranger's shoulder.
It's the difference between adding a few pieces during a game of chess against yourself and doing the same against someone else.
It's the difference between walking down a street and pushing someone aside to do that.
It's the difference between reading a book in the library and reading it in the bookstore.
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.
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.
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.
It's not a "tragedy of the commons", it's the failure of private businesses to monetise their operations without pissing people off so much they go and install special software to avoid it.
By using adblock, you're abusing trust. You're assuming the website you visit is going to be intrusive and horrible to you. You're putting your fingers in your ears and saying "Nothing you ever say to me is going to be useful to me". It's anti-social, and if everyone did it, it'd be a horrible world.
Imagine if you did that on a personal level - if someone started talking to you about a new movie they saw that they liked, and you instantly cover your ears so you can't hear them.
Nonsense! What trust? You put up a website, I visit it. If your whole operation is based upon the "trust" that I'm also going to view your ads - you've got another think coming.
Anyway, I see it from the opposite angle. It was websites abusing my trust - that I would be able to view their content without being subjected to inane, distracting ads - that led me to this attitude in the first place. Adblock users were created, not born.
"You're assuming the website you visit is going to be intrusive and horrible to you."
This is an assumption born of long and miserable experience and I stand by its general accuracy. 75% rule!
"You're putting your fingers in your ears and saying "Nothing you ever say to me is going to be useful to me"."
If I knew someone IRL who spoke with the same abysmal signal-to-noise ratio of your average web advertising, that is exactly what I'd do. Or, rather, I'd wear some kind of filter so I couldn't hear them.
You are constantly defending advertising in this forum - I have to wonder, are we using the same internet? 99.9% of the ads I see are awful. Punch the monkey. Win a PS3! Get your horoscope on your mobile! Repair your Windows registry! They are pure annoying noise. How can you possibly blame me for wanting to block them out?
I have nothing against site owners; hell, I'm a site owner myself. If there was a more surgical way to easily block only the annoying ads, I'd adopt that. There is not, to my knowledge, so I block them all. I don't understand why you can't see that this is a perfectly reasonable reaction.
Yes I think you're browsing a completely different internet. I rarely get irritated by adverts and find most of them interesting and useful. If not personally, definitely from a marketing and monetization point of view.
> If I knew someone IRL who spoke with the same abysmal signal-to-noise ratio of your average web advertising, that is exactly what I'd do. Or, rather, I'd wear some kind of filter so I couldn't hear them.
More likely that you would avoid the person all together. Do the same for websites and everyone is happy.
What does this have to do with advertising? Since when is advertsing equated with speech? The type of advertising blocked by Adblock is a form of unsolicited communication.
Your analogy is a terrible one, by the way. A better one is picking up an ad-supported magazine, and asking a helpful friend (one whose judgement you trust - the parallel here being to the EasyList maintainers) to rip all the ads out for you before you read it.
If people could block ads on TV and in print, prevent themselves from seeing billboards, etc, newsflash: they would! If I could go through my life without being subjected to people trying to sell me stuff all the time, I would be a much happier person.
Just because we grew up in a world dominated by consumerism does not mean that's the way it should be, or the only way it can be. If more people were proactive in refusing to be marketed to I believe the benefits would be positive for all of society.
No. They wouldn't. Guess how I know what films are out at the moment. I look at billboards. I see adverts. They tell me useful stuff.
You're a tiny tiny minority.
>> "Just because we grew up in a world dominated by consumerism does not mean that's the way it should be, or the only way it can be. If more people were proactive in refusing to be marketed to I believe the benefits would be positive for all of society."
You seem to be under the delusion that marketing is a bad thing. It's providing useful information to potential consumers. It works. People like it. It's not going away.
Then, axod, you shouldn't have any problem with those of us who like to block ads. You get to do what you want (not block them), and we can do what we want. We should have no argument.
I don't have a problem with you blocking ads, but I don't understand why you want to. In the same way I can't understand people who think consumerism is bad.
Just don't come running to me when you can no longer visit most websites since they've blocked you.
I started blocking ads when certain sites would bog down my browser with flash (namely, Entrepreneur.com). That's when I discovered ABP. It's just a nicer surfing experience for me without them. But then again, I'm the kind of person that thinks Nike is crazy if they expect me to pay for a t-shirt that simply says "Nike" on it (or carries their swoosh).
Just between you and me (I doubt anybody else is reading any more) I get annoyed at movie previews for the same reason...:) I think I'm the only one on the planet with that particular defective gene.
I love the movie previews in cinemas. Nice to see trailers of what's coming out soon.
What I absolutely hate is adverts in cinemas, and the previews/non skip items on DVDs. To subject people to advertising like that when they have already paid is indefensible.
> What does this have to do with advertising? Since when is advertsing equated with speech? The type of advertising blocked by Adblock is a form of unsolicited communication.
You solicited it with your visit to the site. You didn't leave when confronted with the choice of using my site and viewing ads or leaving. If you don't like my ads, by all means: LEAVE.
Actually, I made an HTTP request to the main page, and then selectively loaded the rest of the page. How can you possibly argue that it's somehow my moral responsibility to load a web page in it's entirety? It's a patently ridiculous notion, and if your business model cannot support people that do it you're fucked.
> Actually, I made an HTTP request to the main page, and then selectively loaded the rest of the page. How can you possibly argue that it's somehow my moral responsibility to load a web page in it's entirety?
You're not doing this by hand. The selectively loading argument is patently absurd. You're altering the standard behaviour of your web browser with the strict intention of denying a site owner their revenue source. You're using something without paying for it.
> and if your business model cannot support people that do it you're fucked.
This is not about my business model. My business model can support it fine, partly because there's so few people like you.
No, this is about morally corrupt people that need a lesson in civility.
You solicited my visit by putting your website on the internet and leading me there by some means. Now I'm going to view it on my own terms. If you don't like that, block me, or take down your site.
Sure. And if I'd opened a store and invited customers in, I was also inviting shop lifters. You know, because I solicited them by opening a store and leading them in by some means, so now they should use the store on their own terms.
I invited genuine customers of course, not leeches.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Did you actually use the web back then? It was dominated by academic, technical information, and useful discussion. No spam, no interstitial ads, no SEO, no bullshit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I actually was looking at this recently. There used to be some foolproof ways to identify ABP, but they removed them - as a bug fix IIRC. They definitely don't want to be identifiably.
But there are a few heuristic methods, basically just loading an image from a blocked domain (it's a sure thing double click will be blocked), waiting, then checking the DOM to see if the element has been removed. Not fool proof, or specific to AdBlock but good enough.
I have a couple of detection demos (including flash block) here:
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
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.