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Adblock buying ads to advertise Adblock

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Re: Adblock buying ads to advertise Adblock

#41
post #13

How likely would advertisers be to refuse to allow the Adblock ads? I don't really have a problem with ads on websites, experienced users can easily block them, but I see no problem with providing ads for a free service. Many organizations only have three methods to generate revenue, either show advertisements, have paid memberships, or take donations. Google shows advertisements, Apple has paid memberships, Wikipedi…

"Plus if Adblock is actually successful and the online advertising industry collapses, then they will be putting themselves out of business." Even worse. Some of these companies (not adblock) are asking protection money from big advertisers to be whitelisted. Mafia style.

[Citation needed.]

Maybe this is well-known, but my google-fu only turned up this news about Adblock Plus. Are you sure Adblock does it as well?

When I used adblock as the search criteria, I got a bunch of hits on it. But when I did adblock -plus, I got nothing primary that could pin this activity to AdBlock.

Re: Adblock buying ads to advertise Adblock

#43

I don't understand how ad-blocking is even legal. It's like stealing - stealing content for free, IMHO there's no difference between stealing MP3s and news or any other content. There's some kind of user agreement between websites and its users - "you can use our site for free, but you have to watch the ads". Adblock violates this agreement. The people responsible for this should be in prison, they're thieves. And I'…

[deleted]

Re: Adblock buying ads to advertise Adblock

#44

I don't understand how ad-blocking is even legal. It's like stealing - stealing content for free, IMHO there's no difference between stealing MP3s and news or any other content. There's some kind of user agreement between websites and its users - "you can use our site for free, but you have to watch the ads". Adblock violates this agreement. The people responsible for this should be in prison, they're thieves. And I'…

Damn. Such a reactionary opinion. I can install whatever I want on my PC, include and specially Adblock.

Re: Adblock buying ads to advertise Adblock

#45

A workaround to this would be self serving the ads, in combination with dynamically named tags / divs etc. Obfuscating would complicate things, but at least it'd be a workaround. It's crazy that buySellAds hasn't taken advantage of this.

This arms race has already begun.

Re: Adblock buying ads to advertise Adblock

#46

I don't understand how ad-blocking is even legal. It's like stealing - stealing content for free, IMHO there's no difference between stealing MP3s and news or any other content. There's some kind of user agreement between websites and its users - "you can use our site for free, but you have to watch the ads". Adblock violates this agreement. The people responsible for this should be in prison, they're thieves. And I'…

painki11er, I salute your trolling skills !

Re: Adblock buying ads to advertise Adblock

#47
post #13

How likely would advertisers be to refuse to allow the Adblock ads? I don't really have a problem with ads on websites, experienced users can easily block them, but I see no problem with providing ads for a free service. Many organizations only have three methods to generate revenue, either show advertisements, have paid memberships, or take donations. Google shows advertisements, Apple has paid memberships, Wikipedi…

Adblock is trying to destroy that method of revenue and the online advertising market, it could destroy many great websites and companies that currently make money from advertising.

This is why native advertising is doing so well lately. Instead of having blockable ads surrounding your content, you subtly twist the content into being an ad of sorts. Ad blocking has helped fuel this and while it can be done well, it can also be done in a shady payola-esque way.. while being far harder to detect or block than regular ads.

Blocking ads is about as effective as banning abortions long-term. There's a non-shifting demand and it'll always find a way to express itself, whether in entirely legal ways or not.

Re: Adblock buying ads to advertise Adblock

#48
post #36
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you choose not to read billboards displayed alongside highways, is that also stealing?

That's not exactly the same as the billboards effectively not existing for you like with adblock. You still see absorb the advertisement passively.

> You still see absorb the advertisement passively.

Good thing I have control of my software and can opt out.

I'm already assaulted at the senses all day long in different forms. The whole concept of advertising I find abhorrent. A service should only offer itself to me when I want it, otherwise they are just imposing themselves and I will dislike them for that.

Any way that I can opt-out of ads I will make use of.

Services that rely on just this business model should adapt or fail, simply. If the service is relevant it will come again from a different source with a more acceptable model.

Re: Adblock buying ads to advertise Adblock

#50

This makes a perfect sense actually. They want as much people as possible to use the extension so that more advertisers are forced to pay to adblock itself to allow the ads through. The ethics on the other hand on such a moves are questionable, since it makes ordinary advertising either obsolete or makes adblock the bottleneck of it's effectiveness.

Ethics? Ad blocking is facilitation of content stealing. Not one inch better than, say, a torrent site where the vast majority of torrents are copyrighted material.
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