Live data from Hacker News

AdBlock Plus will soon allow "non-intrusive" ads by default

adblockplus.org

31–40 of 174 posts

Re: AdBlock Plus will soon allow "non-intrusive" ads by default

#31
post #3

From their FAQ on the subject: >Starting with Adblock Plus 2.0 you can allow some of the advertising that is considered not annoying. By doing this you support websites that rely on advertising but choose to do it in a non-intrusive way. And you give these websites an advantage over their competition which encourages other websites to use non-intrusive advertising as well. In the long term the web will become a bette…

Why does there have to be a compromise? Please don't take this as some sort of flame bait. Instead it is a serious question about why some advertising must exist and be tolerated.

Re: AdBlock Plus will soon allow "non-intrusive" ads by default

#32
post #30
post #15

I'm sort of torn on this. On one hand I do want to support sites that I like and I know that for many this occurs through advertising. On the other hand, I am honestly confused by what the web looks like with ads. Its been so long since the very first thing I did on any new computer, vm, or even non-technically inclined friend's machine wasn't to install ad block. In many cases this wasn't really to not see the ads,…

But your initial decision was to turn off ads, in opposition to your desire to support sites you like, which led to your current notion of where things should be on the page.

Indeed and the reasoning was mentioned in another poster's reply to this thread. There are sites which are simply obnoxious in terms of their ad usage and I'd prefer to avoid it initially rather than opt-in to avoiding it on each site. There is, of course, always was the option to disable ad-block on a particular site but the reality is that I frequent lots of web sites, many from when I was younger and didn't care at all about how the site made money thus would never consider allowing the ads. Now I'm trained to not see the ads, not to say I can't change but I think the take away here is that the addition of ads, even if 'non-intrusive' has a significant impact on the UX of a site.

In no way trying to say my view point is 'correct', completely rational or that I'm the best 'web user' for dealing with it the way I have, but rather simply pointing out a contingent impact on the change from my perspective.

Re: AdBlock Plus will soon allow "non-intrusive" ads by default

#33
post #23

I cannot tell from the announcement whether ABP is now getting paid to allow some ads, but if it is, that looks like a textbook conflict of interest. Wikipedia has a list of ways to mitigate such conflicts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest#Ways_to_mi... , maybe adopting some suggestions from there would help? Also I'm a little confused by the talk of "making small websites unsustainable". Do ads real…

It depends how you define "small". My company runs a few content sites that are primarily monetised through advertising. They're not small as in "some guy updating them in his free time", but they're small as in a few paid members of the editorial team, a few million pages a month. For us, yes, advertising is the difference between us being a profitable company and us not being a company at all. That said, a.) we are…

I don't run AdBlock Plus, but I do use FlashBlock, mainly to cut down on fan noise.

I also have a few entries in my /etc/hosts ...

    127.0.0.1	googleads.g.doubleclick.net
    127.0.0.1	ak.p.openx.net
    127.0.0.1	tags.expo9.exponential.com
    127.0.0.1	resources.infolinks.com
    127.0.0.1	resources.intextscript.com
    127.0.0.1	kona.kontera.com
Google ads was simply responding too slowly. Too many pages were not rendering correctly or at all, pending a response from them. That's probably the fault of web authors not embedding the Google ads correctly. But not to worry. Now I just see error IFrames.

As for the others, the damned double-underscore spam links were getting to be just too annoying while reading text — especially the ones that would react to mouseovers.

Re: AdBlock Plus will soon allow "non-intrusive" ads by default

#34
post #8

Beginning of the end. It's nice that the developers are giving users a choice, even if it's opt-out not opt-in. But AdBlock Plus is a tool to remove ads- that's it. And they're extremely good at it. The moment they become politicized and try to be "a tool to support small websites" or whatever nonsense, marks the beginning of the end.

Stick a fork() in it. It's done.

Re: AdBlock Plus will soon allow "non-intrusive" ads by default

#35
post #31
post #3

From their FAQ on the subject: >Starting with Adblock Plus 2.0 you can allow some of the advertising that is considered not annoying. By doing this you support websites that rely on advertising but choose to do it in a non-intrusive way. And you give these websites an advantage over their competition which encourages other websites to use non-intrusive advertising as well. In the long term the web will become a bette…

Why does there have to be a compromise? Please don't take this as some sort of flame bait. Instead it is a serious question about why some advertising must exist and be tolerated.

Nearly every website would happily have a pay wall if advertising didn't exist.

If the majority of people with internet access preferred to pay directly for every website they use, advertising wouldn't exist. But they don't, so it does.

Re: AdBlock Plus will soon allow "non-intrusive" ads by default

#36
post #31
post #3

From their FAQ on the subject: >Starting with Adblock Plus 2.0 you can allow some of the advertising that is considered not annoying. By doing this you support websites that rely on advertising but choose to do it in a non-intrusive way. And you give these websites an advantage over their competition which encourages other websites to use non-intrusive advertising as well. In the long term the web will become a bette…

Why does there have to be a compromise? Please don't take this as some sort of flame bait. Instead it is a serious question about why some advertising must exist and be tolerated.

I don't believe advertising itself is necessarily evil, and it provides an easy way for website owners to fund operations. You're provided a service for no monetary cost but, in return, you must requite some of your focus to an advertisement. This seems fair to me.

There is no answer to why advertising must exist aside from it being the best answer we have to a growing problem of who's going to pay for the Web. I'd rather have a few ads than fork out money on a package-basis a la cable channels.

Re: AdBlock Plus will soon allow "non-intrusive" ads by default

#37
post #25

No reason for me to enable ads, as long as they have a huge impact on my privacy. I don't intend to send a list of every single site I view to Google. Make a sane ad system, where ads are proxied through the same webserver as the remainder of the page, and I would have no problems with activating them.

[deleted]

Re: AdBlock Plus will soon allow "non-intrusive" ads by default

#38
post #13

Hah, looks like they got bribed by google to start running ads. Never mind that ABP breaks google's business model David and Goliath style. FF should add ABP or similar as default and destroy 20% of google's ad-revenue, that would be the day. (just in case you forgot the 2038 cookie thing & all of googles other privacy abuses.)

Why would FF do that? They get funded by Google.

Re: AdBlock Plus will soon allow "non-intrusive" ads by default

#39
It should've been neither an opt-out nor an opt-in. Since it's a one-time notification, it should've explained the rationale behind this feature and asked for a decision. That would mean treating users as intelligent adults. Pre-selecting a good-deed option for them is annoying and insulting. I know that I don't like a good Samaritan behavior stuffed down my throat, so I would've gone and disabled this feature just as a matter of principle (even though I agree it is reasonable).

Re: AdBlock Plus will soon allow "non-intrusive" ads by default

#40
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does there have to be a compromise? Please don't take this as some sort of flame bait. Instead it is a serious question about why some advertising must exist and be tolerated.

Nearly every website would happily have a pay wall if advertising didn't exist. If the majority of people with internet access preferred to pay directly for every website they use, advertising wouldn't exist. But they don't, so it does.

I think many people would be happy to pay if the payment method was easier and less intrusive. If there was a method for sending a few cents for a pageview without a credit card or permanent account, I would use it , constantly. Such a payment method does not presently exist, paying for stuff is hard and there are fees and fixed costs severely limit making it easier.
Post reply on HN