If they're using a quality ad network (does such a thing exist?) where they honor the site's policy of no flash, no videos, and no auto-play advertisements then sure I'd turn the adblocker off. But that's the kicker for me since I've never seen an ad network that doesn't try to shove flash or scummy adverts in my face. I think the sites that depend on adverts for revenue are not a problem it's the ad networks which refuse to improve the quality of the ads. I swear that the quality of ads have not changed since the late 90s. If anything, I think they're gotten worse with time. When I buy a comic or a newspaper the adverts are fairly decent and they don't disrupt my content consumption. Whereas a website advert can often crash my browser or be part of some exploit/attack without the site or ad network owners knowing about it. So, I run with the adblocker on by default then I white list sites that I know are reputable. I just wish someone comes up with a better ad network to compete with the scummy tactics that are used right now by ad networks which would eliminate my need to use an adblocker altogether.
While I would agree with this line of thought, ad networks have been used for the spread of malware and various scams. Ad networks have also tracked the browsing habits of users, with little regard for our privacy.
It's easy to say that if the site is full of ads, I should not visit it again, however I also do not want to load pieces of Javascript doing the above by mistakenly visiting a website that I do not want to visit. This isn't just an issue of annoyance, but one of online safety as well. I now recommend to every friend I have to use ad blockers.
Therefore I cannot sympathize much with networks complaining or with creators complaining about ad blockers. They've brought this on themselves and unless they change their ways, ad blockers will get more and more popular.
I'll tend to whitelist sites that I find useful, but the moment a distracting ad shows, the ad blocker goes back on. I understand the reason some sites rely on ad revenue, and I sympathise when theyre not given a chance, but if they can't be civil to their users then I see no reason for their users to put up with it.
Like I just said, browser ad blockers have been around for well over a decade, but their installed base has been a pretty small proportion of users until the past few years. A lot of people don't seem to be hugely bothered by a certain level of advertising, at least not enough to go to the effort of installing an adblocker.
Personally, I'd much rather have no advertising at all, but until recently I tried to only block problematic sites, use ABP's Acceptable Ads, and so forth, because I want to support the sites I use regularly even at the cost of very minor irritation. I switched to a scorched-earth policy when it got so bad that many sites were suffering major performance degradation, and many others were plastered with bottom-feeding ads that were actively offensive to me. If things actually improve by some miracle, I'd consider throttling it back a bit.
On the other hand, I'm really pleased to find that they're whitelisting some ads by default, although I'm disappointed that money factors into it.
I use ad blockers, because so much of the web is a hideous mess without them. But I'm somewhat conflicted about it, because I know that a lot of sites depend on ad revenue. I see this as a kind of collective agreement with advertisers: I don't mind adverts, but I don't want them flashing all over my screen when I'm trying to get stuff done.
In principle, I agree with you, however I still use an ad-blocker because I got sick of seeing sexually suggestive ads while looking for technical documentation at the office and at home. I would love for sites to be able to support themselves on advertising revenues and I do try to pay for sites that I find useful, but I'm afraid that from my perspectives, sites with poor advertising have ruined it for the rest. I need a way to my job done without bringing up unpredictable crap on the screen.
I won't use an ad-blocker as I think advertising is legitimate, and provides support for many great sites and potential for important startups.
I do use flashblock/click to flash (which has the side effect of hiding the most offensive video ads). But any site that becomes unbearable with ads, I move on, and don't go there again. I would suggest it is time to avoid those sites.
Absolutely, but I do regularly whitelist sites that I would like to support. I browsed without an ad-blocker because I always figured I would stand ads in exchange for free content, but the obnoxiousness has increased over the years: autoplay audio/video, HUGE flash banners (I remember my PC choking on the Yahoo! homepage on the first day I decided it was time to install an ad-blocker: it was an oversized flash ad for a car). I think I was less annoyed by popups than I was by these.
I don't use an ad blocker but I also don't have Flash installed. That last step was transformative a few years back when Flash was even slower and unreliable on OS X but it's still a surprising win even now.
The main difference I see now is that people with ad blockers talk about frequenting sites which have tons of ads, which doesn't send a message to the owner and probably actually exacerbates the problem since they'll toss bigger, more intrusive ads in ads the clicks-per-visitor rate drops. If I hit a site like that, I'll just leave and go somewhere else which respects its visitors more, particularly if they're savvy enough to follow the lead of sites like ArsTechnica which allow subscribers to disable ads.
i would still not ever visit the site, and i would do everything in my power to rip the content and distribute it freely.
I keep adblock on all the time now, only adding a few exceptions which i deem worthy. My problem is that i can not stand to have so much BS ads added to the text of the page. Sometimes i even use adblock to remove part of the webpages so i only get the content, when the author has made the page to messy.
However, its not that hard to make a page acceptable, just don't add 10 ad boxes around and inside you article. Also don't add ads inside the text I'm reading, that is going to get blocked in seconds. Flash and image ads (especially ones that try to imitate page functions) are atrocities that a lot of times makes me leave a page and not visit it until months later when i forget why i was not visiting it.
The only ads i approve are small, text based ads that are clearly marked as such and that don't interrupt the flow of information from the page. The moment i have to halt and reason if something is and ad or not, you get automatically blacklisted, and heavily so.
On my home network i redirect several abusive ad networks DNS entries to an internal server that hijacks the ads and replaces them with jolly rogers :P
Its really fun to see some pages with 8 jolly rogers smiling back at you giving me a evil grin thinking of the cents the page is loosing.
Not wanting to turn this into a lengthy debate over ad-blockers, but I tend to leave it switched on by default and make an exception for sites I visit regularly, value the content of and which don't go nuts with adverts. I find them fairly useful sometimes and even bought things advertised on these sites in the past.
I use it for technical rather than aesthetic reasons much of the time - a line was crossed when Flash ads started autoplaying videos. Suddenly, a significant proportion of my fairly meagre CPU was being used to show me film trailers or mobile phone adverts rather than for my own uses.
I agree completely with your post, I have left adblockers off before since I do treat the net itself as Mos Eisley and almost just to see what sort of BS places are trying, but I may do it now just because its getting ridiculous.
As far as google ads and where they are placed I find that annoying as heck, to me its like having lag in a video game, why do I want lag every time I search something ? As someone who runs a company I would never do that to my customers, a split second of time from my customers eyes I treat as valuable and something I respect not to mention having to scroll down and chew up even more time.
I get its how they make money with ads, but my taste just finds it annoying, so its one more thing that keeps me away.
Fair point, I haven't browsed the web without an ad blocker for years. Hopefully, ad networks don't have much of a profile on me. I'd like to keep it that way. I feel that keeping a permanent profile on my interests without my consent is wrong, and I take measures against anyone easily building such a profile on me.
Wouldn't a good compromise be to deliver ads that are relevant to the content I'm viewing, instead of ads tailored to my profile? Search ads, for example, are quite fine in my book, as long as they match my immediate search history instead of a personal profile secretly built over a long time.
I don't use ad blockers, but I do just hit the 'back' button when I see a site that's ad-unreadable. I don't feel that I'm missing anything of quality this way.
I have a flash blocker on, which I think ends up doing 90% of what I would want an ad blocker for when combined with my 'back it up on bad ads' policy.
So I can see how ads changed over time. Used practices seem more desperate nowadays, sometimes it's like year 2K again. Even google is using interstitials with misleading controls.
After all, I'm paid with advertising money like most people in the big tech...
I use Flash Block for most sites by default and will only disable it on sites I believe in supporting. I don't hate adverts I just dislike crappy flash ones slowing things down.
I don't have any moral problem with ads and companies need to make money so I don't have an adblocker and I just don't visit sites with obnoxious ads. 90% of the sites I visit (i.e. google, facebook, stackoverflow, reddit, hackernews, xkcd, netflix, etc...) don't have annoying ads.
Oddly enough the only times I have really regretted turning off my ad blocker is when I'm watching videos where an unskippable ad longer than 10 seconds comes up or I go to some news site (which seems to 3/4 of the time have some full page popup or autoplaying video).
I use flashblock instead of adblock. Advertising pays for much of the internet, so I feel it's reasonable to let some of it through. Flashblock kills the worst offenders, and given I also run noscript (which isn't for everyone), the rest of the bad ones are taken care of as well. Simple images are allowed through, and these kinds of ads aren't particularly distracting. In the rare case there is a bad animated .gif, hitting 'esc' stops them cycling.
Adblock just feels like bad faith to me - there is no 'give and take', it's just 'take'.
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