If there's one thing that annoys me about the web, it's adverts. You know, those designed-to-be-annoying animated / not so animated graphics and recently blocks of text. Luckily, I am no longer annoyed, for technology from the future has come back in time and provided me with Firefox and Adblock. "Adblock is a content filtering plug-in for the Mozilla and Firebird browsers". Compare and contrast the same page using Safari and Firefox + Adblock.
Notice the lack of the wide banner add, or the ones on the left. Notice no more Google or Sponsored links. Notice that removing these ads allows me to read a whole extra long paragraph of the story with the same browser size.
Adblock has changed the way I access the web. It's really quite like Tivo: it makes it more efficient for me and thus more fun. I don't know how I could live without it now.
Of course, you have to train Adblock. You have to say, hey, this is an ad, no longer show me things from www.foo.com/ads/. This is relatively easy to do, just right-click on the image, select "Adblock image", edit the regular expression (mmmm, Perly) and see no more ads like that one again.
Oh, I should probably talk about the web developer toolbar at some point too. Anyway, do you have any other adblocking tips?
-Dom
You don't need to install anything, Opera has a built in filter mode. It doesn't have a GUI interface or support RegEx, but it can take wildcards like AdBlock, and you edit the config file with any text editor you want. See URL Filtering with Opera for more details. A quick google should pull up a list of filters that work in both Opera and AdBlock.
Another option is to tamper with your hosts file, to redirect well know advert servers into a loopback blackhole. That way you can use any browser you want. See Hosts File Project for an example.
I've used a combination of AdBlock or Opera Filters and hosts files for quite a while now, and I find it makes browsing work. To use a computer that isn't running some form of Ad/Pop up blocking, or even worse running IE, is just unbearable.
Re:Sites die because of ad blockers
ajt on 2004-10-05T10:16:05
It is true that a site needs money to function, and it has to come from somewhere.
I'd be curious to know how much smaller sites get from adverts, if it's actually enough to make a real difference? Larger sites, I'm sure, do get enough eye-balls to generate actual revenue from advertising, however there are only a few really big sites out there.
To me, most adverts are annoying, bandwidth stealing parasites. Google style text ads are not so bad, and they are often vaguely pertinent, but they are often poorly implemented by the site and break up the page design. Seeing as I never click through, and Google only charge for click thoroughs (I believe), I'm not taking money away from anyone by suppressing them.
I'm not a fan of advertising at all, and I've never been convinced of the commercial viability of it on the Internet. I make no comment on how sites are to be funeded in the future, but I think Adblocking will be come more wide spread, as will the countermeasures no doubt.
Re:Sites die because of ad blockers
Juerd on 2004-10-05T16:45:06
I'd be curious to know how much smaller sites get from adverts, if it's actually enough to make a real difference?
For example, www.raid-arrays.net, which gets around 50 visitors per day, generates US$ 4 per month. This is enough to cover the domain name and hosting. However, juerd.nl, with 150 visitors per day, generates less that US$ 1 per month. This is not at all worth the trouble of even putting the banner there, and does not cover hosting. What does cover hosting of juerd.nl is the banner revenue of wapsilon.com, which is over US$ 250 per month. With this, I pay several domains used by Wapsilon, the dedicated server required for this resource-heavy application, and the bandwidth it generates. Wapsilon has a CTR (click-through-rate) of less than 0.1% (7% is normal, 0.1% is exceptionally low).
It depends on the quality of the site, how annoying the banners are (Wapsilon could do much better, IMHO) and the topic. But in general it IS enough to gather the money to let a site function.Re:Sites die because of ad blockers
ajt on 2004-10-05T20:05:10
Fair enough.
I see walsilon.com uses Google. Am I correct in thinking that Google only pays the site if there is an actual click-through? If so, me blocking the ad makes no difference, as I never click through on adverts out of principle. I gather some advertisers pay per page impression, where presumably ad blocking is more critical.
I don't believe that advertising really works anyway. I also think that advertisers are driving people to the adblockers because the adverts are too intrusive, and annoying. If a healthy balance could be found, then most people would tollerate the subtle adverts and most people wouldn't install ad blocking tools. I'd still block them, as I really don't like adverts, and I'm sure a small core of people would, but most people wouldn't bother.
I'm not against paying for something if it's worth it, I do buy things, Opera for example. I prefer to pay for something directly rather than having them "sponsored", but I accept most people prefer to pay extra for their goods and services and then believe that their ad sponsored content is "free".
Re:Sites die because of ad blockers
cog on 2004-10-06T11:29:21
Anyway, one can chose from "Hide ads" or "Remove ads"... I suppose that if you're not clicking on the ads, the "Hide ads" option (which won't make anything faster but will still be better for your eyes) won't make any difference to them...Re:Sites die because of ad blockers
SuperCruncher on 2004-10-12T21:15:03
I'd be curious to know how much smaller sites get from adverts, if it's actually enough to make a real difference?Speaking as someone who has had considerable experience of online advertising since about 1997 or so, I can say that it can make a huge difference. "Way back in the day" sites with decent traffic were earning around $1,500 - $2,000 USD/month. These days reasonable sites can still earn around $150-$200 USD/month without too much work.
I find a lot of these ad blocking tools frustrating. I'm not justifying intrusive and highly distractive ads, but these have only been introduced at the request of advertisers who have been seeing declining revenues from standard banners, as they got blocked by ad blocking software. Plus it annoys me that most people have zero objection to ads in any other medium, but object to them online. Yes, they make the site slower to load, but they also make it exist!
Just remember, whatever your opinion of online advertising, one the biggest players in the online advertising world uses Perl extensively and has donated a lot of time and money to the Perl Foundation.
Re:Sites die because of ad blockers
ajt on 2004-10-13T07:57:57
I find all forms of advertising intrusive and annoying. I live in a country where we still have quality public television and radio that is advert free. I find paying for those channels out of "taxation" as a perfectly acceptable alternative to advertising funding. I also prefer to read magazines that are more expensive, but carry less advertising than cheaper ones.
I NEVER buy anything from a web site advert, so it doesn't make any difference if I block an advert, if the agent pays the site per click-throughs only. If it's a page impression payment, then my blocking behaviour will alter their payments.
Unlike the US, I also live in a country where most people still pay for their Internet connection per second or per byte, so I resent having to pay for the adverts. It's not content I want, but I have to pay to receive it, which just isn't fair.
I don't mind sites, small or large, that include integrated promotional graphics or texts. I don't even mind the odd text-only advertisement that's integrated into the site, where it's easy to ignore. Anything that moves or breaks up the flow, is a sure fire way to ensure that I never use the company that is advertising.
Personally, I don't even think advertising works particularly well in general, and specifically on the web...
Re:Sites die because of ad blockers
KLB on 2004-10-25T18:44:47
The internet, like it or not, is a gigantic free market. It is unfortunate that you pay by the amount of informatrion you use, that undermines the progress of the internet. However advertising is what pays for any free site that isnt 100% donation based.
You can choose not to visit sites whose advertising schemes you disagree with, but instead you ruin the system by patronizing those sites and cheating the ads. This will only make things worse as it removes the self regulating function of a free market (market response/ demand).
again i will say the intenet, regardless of which country it is accessed from, is a free market, in which very few things globaly affect who can visit what. As such trying to approach from another direction can be damaging to its future.
Re:Sites die because of ad blockers
Smylers on 2004-10-05T21:07:00
Banners exist because big sites cannot be hosted and maintained for free. Many sites depend on donations and banner revenue.Indeed: the site acme screen-shotted needs advert income to pay the salaries of its journalists and techies (including one YAPC Europe attendee Leon has met!).
Personally it's the flashing and animation that I find distracting and annoying. I've set Firefox only to animate gifs once then stop on the last frame (type
about:configin the navigation bar, search for “anim”, double-click onimage.animation_mode, and set it toonce) and installed the Flashblock extension, which replaces Flash animations with a ‘play’ button, so you only see any you specifically request.I find that those together (plus pop-up blocking, of course) keep the advertising down sufficiently not to be too irritating.
But anybody who does go further and block all ads from a site they read shouldn't do so quietly: you should mail the editorial folks (not the ad sales people) saying that you're doing this because the amount/slowness/irritatingness of the advertising on the site has become unbearable, but you do like their content.
If you don't tell them then they won't know, and the advertisers will keep finding even more ludicrous ways to reduce the quality of the site; if you do tell them, there's a chance they may do something about it. (It's in nobody's interests for the advertisers to get so greedy that everybody starts blocking all adverts.)
SmylersRe:Sites die because of ad blockers
Juerd on 2004-10-07T10:52:16
You are right. When blocking ads because you think they are annoying, communicate to the site why you do so. Some sites now use confirm() based popups instead of open() based ones to avoid blocking of the popup, and I believe that this is because people have not made clear enough that popups are incredibly annoying.
Re:A solution for Firefox and Safari
educated_foo on 2004-10-20T04:29:19
Or for Safari, there's PithHelmet. If advertisers could stick to stationary images, I probably wouldn't bother blocking them, since I have broadband. But to me, any animation makes it nearly impossible to read the text of the page, and since so many subscribe to the "annoying flashing monkey" theory of marketing, everyone loses.
