Ars Technica blocks ad-blocking readers
p2pnet view P2P | Advertising:- “I am embarrassed for P2PNet. It begs for money in public like a beggar on on a street street corner looking for hand outs. I see you have only managed to cheat your readers out of $13.01 this month. Does that not tell everything you need to know? What are your figures? 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 a month? You should do what yu keep promising to do and shut P2PNet down. People see it for what it is.”
The comment above went up about 10 minutes after I posted the second ad on the right. And whoever wrote it seems to have been so upset s/he was stuttering —- “on on a street street”.
Since s/he asked, and because it meshes in with an interesting email from Devil’s Advocate on the subject of metrics, in January, according to Awstats, of 244,010 visits to p2pnet, 140,622 were uniques.
This time last year it was a lot more than that. But shit happens, as they say.
Late in 2009, I moved from a host in the US to a host in Belgium. But because of a huge mix-up at Go Daddy, it took eight days to complete the transfer and during that time my Google rank plummeted from 6 out of 10 to zero, and my stats went down to 2,000 or 3,000 a day.
I have no idea why the lost eight days had such a dramatic effect, but they did. By February the rank was back to 6 out of 10, and traffic is slowly re-building. One week into March, I’m averaging 6,230.71 uniques a day, says Awstats. Last month, the average was 7,799.18.
Of ‘downward spirals’
If you’re consciously and deliberately communicating with other people, as I am, obviously, 100 visitors are better than 10. But to a lot of people, traffic counts don’t matter. They’re bloggers so they blog. To anyone who depends on the number of clicks each advertisement on the site produces, though, the amount of traffic isn’t only important, it’s vital —- although I wonder what it’s really worth to the advertisers.
If 1,000 people click on an ad, what does it mean? Gargle, or someone like it, large or small, and the owners of the site carrying the ad get paid, and data used for creating databases and behavioural targeting are gathered.
But how many of those clicks actually generate a hard sale, or even an inquiry?
A couple of years ago, “Advertisers believe it’s carved in stone we’ll continue to buy their ‘product,’ which increasingly looks the same, sounds the same, smells the same and tastes the same, no matter how they treat us”, I said in p2pnet, going on >>>
But we’re not buying it, in any sense.
The print and electronic media as they used to exist, and as they still exist in the eyes of most people who are in charge of them, aren’t merely in the doldrums: they’re dying. And it has nothing to do with the “weak U.S. economy”.
The “downward spirals” and “tumbling advertising revenues” are due to the fact consumers are customers again, and discerning ones at that. The cheap tricks routinely used by the advertising, marketing and promotion industry just don’t work anymore.
The Net is to blame. It’s having a major impact on traditional advertising and news delivery systems because as more and more men, women and children open online accounts, they’re increasingly becoming their own media providers on an individual and group basis. So who needs the heavily biased, often inaccurate, advertiser-controlled corporate press and their allied ’services,” as they are at the moment?
Who? And how?
“One thing I’ve never truly delved in was the way various ads generate revenue for a site”, says Devil’s Advocate in his email, going on >>>
I always assumed that, in the simplest model, an advertiser paid a percentage based on “unique visitor” page view count, collected by the servers of the sponsored site, and “click-throughs” were an additional “bonus”. Now, I’m wondering if I’ve got it wrong about WHO collects this count, and HOW it’s obtained.
The reason my query is, after coming across this at Ars…
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love.ars
… I’m confused at to why using an “ad blocker” would screw up a site’s ability to report a true count to its sponsors, unless these advertisers are actually collecting the information themselves, directly or indirectly, through a “trusted 3rd party” arrangement.
The other thing that comes to my mind (and that I don’t see reflected in the many comments Ars got for this post)…
Isn’t one of the key reasons for using an ad blocker to PROTECT the user from this type of 3rd-party activity?!
And, is Ars attempting to dish out a “guilt trip” to its readers, hoping they’ll all just turn off the ad blockers or whitelist all the sites involved (thereby enabling all 3rd-party user tracking), just to keep its sponsors happy??
‘Blocking ads is stealing’
“Adblock plus is one of the great reasons to use Firefox,” said a Reader’s Write as far back as 2007, continuing, “I always install it on others peoples systems for them. They always tell me afterwards that pages load faster, and it’s now a pleasure to browse. As far as i’m concerned, everyone should get firefox + adblock plus + g.filterset.”
It came in a story headlined Firefox: advertising thief discussing stand-alone ,or built-in, applications designed to block advertising.
“You’ve reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks the FireFox browser”, said whyfirefoxisblocked.com the then new site dedicated to trying to convince us blocking ads we don’t want to see isn’t our right, and anyone or anything which helps us to do so is a thief.
It declared >>>
The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software. Many site owners therefore install scripts that prevent people using ad blocking software from accessing their site. That is their right as the site owner to insist that the use of their resources accompanies the presence of the ads.
While blanket ad blocking in general is still theft, the real problem is Ad Block Plus’s unwillingness to allow individual site owners the freedom to block people using their plug-in. Blocking FireFox is the only alternative. Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.
“Jeez,” said another Reader’s Write. “I’ve been house sitting for a few days so I watched a few programs on cable.
“OMG, I changed the channel every time commercials came on. Who knew I was stealing?”
‘Blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love’
In the Ars Technica post DA mentions in his email, Ken Fisher kicks off, “Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I’m going to explain why.
“There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong.”
Hmmmm. How can that be?
“Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis,” says Ars, continuing, “If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay. In a way, that’s what ad blocking is doing to us. Just like a restaurant, we have to pay to staff, we have to pay for resources, and we have to pay when people consume those resources. The difference, of course, is that our visitors don’t pay us directly but indirectly by viewing advertising. (Although a few thousand of you are subscribers, and we thank you all very, very much!)
“My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real advertising death spin.”
So, “Starting late Friday afternoon we conducted a 12 hour experiment to see if it would be possible to simply make content disappear for visitors who were using a very popular ad blocking tool”, says Fisher.
“Technologically, it was a success in that it worked. Ad blockers, and only ad blockers, couldn’t see our content.”
What a good idea! Ban readers who ignore your ads!
He goes on >>>
Socially, the experiment was a mixed bag. A bunch of people whitelisted Ars, and even a few subscribed. And while others showed up to support our actions, there was a healthy mob of people criticizing us for daring to take any kind of action against those who would deny us revenue even though they knew they were doing so. Others rightly criticized the lack of a warning or notification as to what was going on.
Ad blockers block ads. But is that all they block?
In his email, “The way it looks to me right now is, the 3rd parties are insisting on placing active cookies or engaging in any other user tracking activities (whether direct or indirect), and the ad blockers are preventing these sponsors from doing so, thereby ‘damaging the relationship” between Ars and its sponsors’ ( ? ),” says DA, adding >>>
Now, I’m not saying a site shouldn’t have the right to opportunities to earn money, but if my assumptions are correct, this is not the kind of business model I would support. I don’t visit sites that want to automatically connect my machine to a gang of unknown 3rd parties, regardless of what any of them *say* they’re not collecting or sharing.
My computer won’t allow this type of thing, anyway, but if I can’t configure my computer’s security to my satisfaction without it becoming a ‘moral issue’ for the sites I want to visit, I would say the problem would be only with their business models, and shouldn’t be my concern.
Either there’s something really odd going on here, or I really have to educate myself on this topic.
Do you see what I’m getting at?
I do, DA.
Meanwhile …
… returning to the nastygram mentioned at the beginning, “I see you have only managed to cheat your readers out of $13.01 this month”, it says.
The figure was $13.91, not $13.01, and the people who contributed did so because they like p2pnet — same as the people who pumped in more than $1,000 last month.
Having said that, I think I recognise the style: the post is very similar in construction to others that’ve been arriving fairly regularly over the past few months. But I’m encouraged because they don’t look like the usual troll junque and flames every site gets.
Rather, they fit a pattern.
Are they part of some kind of campaign and if they are, who’s behind them, and why? Is this just one person with a hard-on for p2pnet? Or is it someone with enough resources to hire a troll to try to minimise p2pnet?
If it’s the former, get a life. But if it’s the latter, great! 
Stirring things up is one of the things advocacy and alternative news sites such as p2pnet are all about
Finally, by way of a heads up, one of my problems has been: as a businessman, I’d make a great bus driver.
With that in mind, for the last few weeks I, and a net pioneer whom I’ve known almost since the beginning, have been talking about him taking over day-to-day management of p2pnet, while I continue to be responsible for content.
It’s looking promising.
So stay tuned.
Cheers! And all the best …
Jon
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
p2pnet – Online advertising and the New Consumer, September 2, 2008
Ars Technica – Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love, March 6, 2010
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/feed
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
Back to You’ve reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks the FireFox browser, it’s the headline on a new site dedicated to trying to convince us blocking ads we don’t want to see isn’t our right, and anyone or anything which helps us to do so is a thief.
whyfirefoxisblocked.com declares:
The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software. Many site owners therefore install scripts that prevent people using ad blocking software from accessing their site. That is their right as the site owner to insist that the use of their resources accompanies the presence of the ads.
While blanket ad blocking in general is still theft, the real problem is Ad Block Plus’s unwillingness to allow individual site owners the freedom to block people using their plug-in. Blocking FireFox is the only alternative. Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.
March 7th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Hey Jon,
You hit a sore spot with me here – I’m already severely ticked off at the DRM on the new CD I purchased several weeks ago, and now ARSE wants me to stop using my adblockers!! Fat chance.
Slightly off topic: Anyone know how to play a DRM’d CD on a computer runnning Ubuntu without the DRM? My computer is the only machine I have with decent sound, and due to the DRM this CD is not listenable. Why record companies (EMI) think this kind of poor product quality is ok is beyond me!!
March 7th, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Dotty: I thought they stopped making DRM infested CDs when the rootkit fiasco blew up in sony’s face? Which CD is it? I just boycott anything with DRM on it. They peddlers of this shit just lose money and they can’t sue me for filesharing and it’s supposed “loss” of revenue to them.
I use FF with Adblock+ and FlashBlock and it’s letting me browse it. However, it does have an article their on how I’m “hurting” them. The minute they try to enforce me watching their ads, they come off my favourites and I stop recommending them. Period.
March 7th, 2010 at 5:11 pm
@ Cynix:
The CD is from 2007, Shane Nicholson’s Faith & Science. Not available in torrent except in an incomplete (53% @#!) form. I have tried downloading it at least 3 different times over the last year or so, and never see a complete version. I love his music and felt I had no choice but to buy it. I rarely buy new CDs any more and it (foolishly) had not occurred to me that this one would be a problem. Plays perfectly fine in my CD/radio with the crappy speakers, but sound breaks up every 10 or 15 seconds when playing in computer drive, plus it takes forever to rip (and I don’t know if I can even do it, only managed to rip one song after 5 minutes!). I am assuming that this is due to DRM, as I don’t know what else it would be with a brand new CD.
March 7th, 2010 at 5:14 pm
It’s an EMI cd.
March 7th, 2010 at 5:25 pm
@ Dorothy:
You mean you still go to Arse? Nate is the only writer worth reading there (covers head and waits for shower of cabbages and tomatoes
)
Cheers!
March 7th, 2010 at 5:30 pm
I read this (as always way too long an) article and the Ars one, as I have thoughts on the matter but to be honest still am not sure what Jon’s opinion on ad-blocking is, my failure there I guess? So I am not having a go at P2Pnet or Jon, unless he does have a problem with adblockers.
To me a website owner wishing to run a website and using adds is fine. But complaining about their visitors using ad-blocking plug-ins brings to mind the present day music industry!
Both wanting to do what they want in their way and are trying to force there customer into complying with their business model, regardless of whether it works or not.
If you make your site open to the public and do your S.E.O. to make it rank high in the search engines, you have to accept the people and their browsing habits that frequent your site.
If you want people to pay, make it subscription only and make them log in.
I like what I find here, (mostly) so I come back, but if it (and or Ars Technica) go sub’ only or disappear, I’ll find someone else that wants to do the same kind of site either for free or without complaints that their readers are ’stealing’ from them.
I have to say my view on life is to give as much as possible and I do, both A.F.K. and on the nets but I don’t expect everyone to do the same. Though please don’t complain and just like the music industry, call your customers ‘thieves’!
March 7th, 2010 at 5:41 pm
@ Peter:
Let me put it this way — lots of readers use ad blockers, and have no qualms in saying so in Reader’s Writes. And they’re still here and posting happily.
Cheers!
PS – Sorry about the length. Next time I’ll post in short-hand.
)
March 7th, 2010 at 7:26 pm
@ Jon:
No, don’t spend much time at ARSE (on arse is another story altogether
), I went through a “Live Bookmark every available RSS feed” spree when I figured out to how use it years ago, and never took them out. Suspect that they will be toast soon, as I don’t agree with their opinions on adblockers!
Sorry, costs too much to send cabbages & tomatoes by Canada Post; if you are looking for fresh veggies try your local grocery store.
March 7th, 2010 at 8:02 pm
> I use FF with Adblock+ and FlashBlock and it’s letting me browse it. However, it does have an article their on how I’m “hurting” them. The minute they try to enforce me watching their ads, they come off my favourites and I stop recommending them. Period.
If you’re blocking their ads anyway, why the hell would they care if you stop visiting?
Seriously, I’m dying to know. The way you write it, it comes across as some kind of a threat, but what exactly are you threatening here? To no longer give the site your worthless–literally, since you’re blocking ads–page views? I bet they wish more ad blockers would do the same.
March 7th, 2010 at 8:54 pm
I’ve never been bashful here to say, I use adblocker as well as noscript and I am not going to stop using them.
For one, my b/w speed is crap. Anything extra that has to load, takes forever. Don’t even talk about flash ads. Displaying ads delays the loading times to unbearable times.
I have uninstalled flash. I don’t have it on the computer mainly because of the abuse advertisers have done with it on the net. Despite not having flash, every day, somewhere, an ad attempts to slip in a LSO flash cookie. It gets promptly deleted but still this is the sort of dealings with advertisers surfers experience and there are worse, such as slipping in malware through javascript, hijacking browsers, and on and on. It’s the reason that all but most uninformed are using adblockers to begin with. They nor I will lower this protection to satisfy a few sites.
Over at ARSTechinca, if you are bold enough to tell them this, then there are already several in the thread that have been banned. Not for bad language nor manners but for saying the blockers are not coming off. If they don’t want me coming by to read and article then paywall the thing off. I’m good with that.
Their overlord has given them the gospel from on high apparently and they are now in lockstep that you just have to open up to ads so they can earn their money. Those unscruplous advertisers for all these years hammering, brow beating, invading privacy, yada yada, yada, are the reason everyone is running adblockers now. They’ll have to go a long ways (if it can ever be done) to restore the faith of surfers that advertisers can be trusted and I for one don’t believe that’s possible as long as the dollar bill (or insert whatever currency you want here) flows their way.
It may be their site and bandwidth, it is not their cpu that is loaded on these ads, it is not their b/w that it takes to display these obnoxious items on your computer, and as long as I am in control of my computer, unblocking isn’t going to happen.
March 7th, 2010 at 9:53 pm
I’d be happy if the ads were the simple static type like p2pnet displays on the sides and top. I actually turn OFF my ad blockers on here and do look and click on them.
But no, most ads on other sites, are constantly animated, rotating, flickering, annoying in-your-face monstrocities that really irritate me. No way am I putting up with that and the ad blockers remain on. FF has the best ad blocking by far and is the number one reason that I use it. Until other browsers implement this functionality, they don’t get a look-in from me. Period.
Have you noticed that the Flash plugin has no way to turn off the animations and never has done? It’s obvious Adobe are in cahoots with the advertisers to force their annoyance on you, or you can bet your boots that most people would have the things turned off by default.
Before FF was a viable option, removing the Flash plugin from IE also didn’t work – you got the Flash installation prompt CONSTANTLY, with every click on that website. Funnily enough, IE has never had a way of turning that off, either…
Given all this, sites like Arse really should get off their fucking high horse and either shut up or change their advertising practices, to make us actually *want* to see them. p2pnet has successfully done this, so my point is proved.
March 7th, 2010 at 10:10 pm
To show how desperate they are to get surfers to open their blockers, they are now claiming that if you register to make a comment you have by default agreed to view their ads through the TOS. This means that I won’t register, won’t comment, and even better may all together forget their site. It’s already not worth going to on the weekends and I am finding less and less that I actually want to link to and expose someone else to this insanity of the viewer being the cash cow.
As this thread has progressed in comments I find that either most are the sheeple that will say ok, done because you asked. Only they didn’t start out asking. They started out blocking by their own words. Since I never go to their forums, who knew? They are more than welcome to paywall it off. It seems that’s not what they are after though. They know as well as you or I that paywalling means a drop in viewership and consequently a drop in income from ads. So the idea is to either guilt trip the readers into whitelisting or to try and browbeat them into it.
The attitude coming across out of this is distasteful and I probably won’t return as the content there isn’t all that great. I view this as no loss for either of us. I can only hope that 10 or 12 thousand other viewers decide the same thing.
March 7th, 2010 at 11:39 pm
Any business selling goods or services needs to consider what its customers want/need, and supply accordingly. It is not good customer service to guilt your customers into taking your product as you wish to supply it (without adblockers), and to disregard how customers have indicated they want it (with adblocking).
March 7th, 2010 at 11:48 pm
Why is Firefox blocked?
Here is why.
http://whyisfirefoxblocked.com/
(this is not the original site, the original site is long gone)
March 7th, 2010 at 11:53 pm
I will choose what i allow into my home and some sites the content is fine (eg. making a free logo, button etc) but I don’t want the ads that feature barely clothed bikinni models or gambling sites in my brorswer so i choose to block ads. if that ticks off some, fine they can block me, i’ll go elsewhere
March 7th, 2010 at 11:59 pm
I’ll be odd person out….
Ars screwed up that initial ‘test’, and they’ve owned that, repeatedly. That said, they’re reliant on a 3rd party ad group because they’re with Conde Naste, and they usually have pretty reasonable ads for the site. Also, if you hate ads (I do) and find high value in their original content reporting (again, I do), pay them a $50/year or (as of next month) the monthly subscription to get rid of ads + some other perks. This is, I will point out, similar to what Jon is trying to do here, save that he hasn’t blocked content to people using ad blockers (something Ars recognized was a not-good move on their part).
I’ve been in conversations with people complaining about everything from an extra few seconds load time (in FF, see a change in load from about 2sec with ABP to 5-6sec w/o ABP), ‘bad business models’, ‘bad content’, etc etc. There are a lot of strong writers with Ars, and Ars *isn’t* a personal site. It’s a professional news and content generation environment. Given the high number of technically inclined people who visit on a regular basis, one can expect that ABP is more heavily used by that audience than, say, the audience of CNN by percentages. They’re just asking those same people to think about the possible implications of enabling ABP for sites that they visit (Ars, in particular) on a regular basis.
If you look at traffic patterns, Ars generates a *lot* of traffic. They’re not going to ‘win’ a fight with ad blockers, and I don’t think they want to. What they also don’t want to do is lay off additional employees, like they did last year. Good people were let go, and the people work like dogs to get articles out. The website is designed so that all ads load in iFrame – the content will load quickly regardless, though you may need to wait for a ‘full page load’ as they are forced to rely on 3rd party ad servers.
There are a lot of places that do really, really terrible advertising and if you look at them I don’t think you can reasonably count Ars amongst them. They avoid garish ads, do target their ecosystem, and have options to pay to drop the advertising. This latter option is often pushed by people; ‘why not offer a model whereby if we toss you some cash, we don’t see ads’ (something, I will note, that comes up here on a regular basis when Jon notes he’s short on money) – if you value their content (and hence think their continued operation is important), then why not follow through on the last option?
Note: none of this is meant as an ‘attack’ or anything of the sort. If you read any anger/annoyance in this comment, it’s frustration at what seems (to me!) to be a disconnect between valuing content, and recognizing that for the content to keep coming content producers need some kind of income, which often comes through advertising. I hate advertising, but if I need to suffer through it so a few favoured sites continue, then I’ll swallow my annoyance to let people like Jon and Ars capture a bit of revenue from my page impressions.
March 8th, 2010 at 12:53 am
I’ve read “guilt” whiny posts (NOT from Jon) about people using ad blockers before. That argument got flushed down the internet toilet the first time I read about someone getting a virus from one of them. It wasn’t a malicious site, what happened is he had rotating ads from some “ad farm” that he got a % of the money when ads were clicked. The ad farm wasn’t malicious either, as people paid them to host their ads. Someone who WAS malicious paid them to host the offending ad, and that’s how it got on a supposedly “safe” site. I think in this case a complaint was filed, and the malicious ad removed from the rotation, but seriously if it’s a case between risk to my computer and someone else ad revenue, they are going to lose.
If they want to get pissy about it and block me, so be it. Ars pisses and moans about firefox, I wonder if the would recommend IE to their readers. If so, they can go fuck themselves. A major reason to use firefox is that it does NOT support ActiveX, which is M$’s back door web virus propagation machine.
March 8th, 2010 at 2:22 am
@Chris:
Ars may have “owned up” to the flawed experiment, but they’re still pushing the propaganda about people that use ad blockers being directly responsible for sites losing revenue and people getting laid off, and all the rest that goes with it.
As others have already said here, it’s supposed to be “horse”, then “cart”. You don’t ask for people to cooperate with your business model… you design your business model to harmonize with the people.
This whole idea that we are just supposed to accept data mining, user tracking, privacy concessions and an endless stream of ads as “part and parcel” of “today’s Internet” is nothing but an abomination in itself. And, when the users begin to be labelled as “thieves” or similar for not going along with this spin, it’s time to start reminding those sites that are applying that label of what the Internet is and always was, and why the content was being posted in the first place.
Ars themselves have made many posts describing the problem of the movie, software and recording industries trying to protect an inappropriate business model by trying to monkey-wrench the Internet and its users. Ars needs to review the principles at stake that are reflected in that material, and ask themselves how their present “ad blockers are hurting us” campaign actually differs from the “filesharers are devastating us” crusade of the recording industry.
March 8th, 2010 at 2:51 am
@Chris:
(Addendum…)
I don’t think there is a “disconnect” between the valued content and the readers’ desire to see the site survive. I do think Ars is getting backlash from its readers for an obviously ingenuous campaign.
There’s a shitload of reasons why an increasing number of people want to limit what is really a questionable, unsolicited 3rd-party connection. No matter how much you trust the site itself, you have no idea most of the time what 3rd parties are operating through it, and what those 3rd parties might be doing. And, though you may really like a site, you can’t excuse that site for any “bad behaviour” its practices enable.
The bottom line is, they’re not suppose to be insisting, suggesting, implying, or even hinting that the users are wrong in protecting themselves. Even from a “technical” standpoint, that stance is obscene!
March 8th, 2010 at 8:44 am
@ DA and Chris:
“You don’t ask for people to cooperate with your business model… you design your business model to harmonize with the people.”
Exactly. And there’s the common flaw.
Cheers!
March 8th, 2010 at 10:18 am
“Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers. ”
False most people I have talked to use firefox but no idea on their buying habits. Of course ie still tops the charts though and opera is moving up also.
March 8th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
“…whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners…”
There’s a perfect example of the spin I’m talking about.
The term “resource theft” is used to describe what spam does. In a nutshell, the unwanted promotion of something inappropriate to that venue, or inappropriate to the medium used, on someone else’s nickel. Spam is a classic example of theft of resources, as it satisfies all criteria.
Ad blocking is merely an attempt by a user to stop unwanted use of his/her OWN resources. I would argue that it is the ADVERTISERS who have adopted theft of resources as a regular component in their business models, which often includes unconsentual pursuit of personal data.
Saying, “honest, hard-working website owners” are being “stolen” from, is the finishing touch to the propaganda. This can be compared to the way the recording industry says filesharers are “taking food out the mouths of the artists”. (And, we all know how music profits are distributed.)
Unbelievably, the users now find themselves being called “criminal” from a different angle, as another corporate agenda surfaces over another broken business model.
March 9th, 2010 at 8:38 am
When Ars was sold I stopped reading it, thus any ads are irrelevant as I for one will never see them or any of Ars’s precious content, not suprisingly I dont seem to have noticed missing any of their big news, instead finding the same stories virtually at many other sites.
March 9th, 2010 at 9:49 pm
The issue is not whether to block or not to block it is more fundamental.
There is an implicit assumption that advertising in its current format will continue as it has always done. In other words an industrial-age concept of billboards can be successfully grafted onto the information superhighway.
This is working at the moment only because an information age alternative has not yet emerged where vendors can meet with consumers in a more efficient, less intrusive and more cost-effective environment.
Information age advertising mediums are inevitable and are starting to appear right now. One example is the Customer Satisfaction Monitor which has recently been launched.
This Customer Satisfaction Monitor (http://www.customersatisfactionmonitor.com) answers the three most important pre-purchase questions and introduces a new step into the sales process. Advertisers can now target prospects at a very crucial point in the sales process much more cost-effectively and less intrusively because the consumer is in control.
As an advertiser it will be increasingly uneconomical to advertise elsewhere because potential customers will be ambushed at services like the Customer Satisfaction Monitor. Industrial-age advertising will, as a result, wither on the vine.
For those services relying on advertising it is time to rethink your revenue model.
March 10th, 2010 at 1:43 am
I don’t object to advertising itself. What I object to are the same things as most of the others on here have complained about; Obnoxious ads that interfere with reading the page.
A couple years ago, one site I visit started having ads that after you had clicked a couple links, would fade the entire page out to be replaced by an ad, which would make you wait about 10 seconds before a “No thanks” button appeared. When clicked, it would take you back to the top of the page you were on. Looking through the code for the page, I saw that the ads were all coming from Adbrite, so I added them to my hosts file, re-direcetd to 127.0.0.1. A few other sites started having them also, so I added them to the hosts file as well.
I’ve had Flashblock installed for a long time, but it doesn’t work very well. A lot of Flash ads seem to be able to bypass it. In particular, there was a Laptop ad on Ars, right on the front page, that would let you browse the site for a few seconds, then it replace the entire front page with a fake Flash copy (nothing worked), the laptop would zoom to the center of the page, open up and display some marketing hype. You couldn’t close the ad until it was finished.
The IMDb also started having animated ads that opened over the main page.
That was about the time I started turning Javascript off. I installed an extension that added a button for Java and a button for Javascript to the bottom of the window. I now keep JS turned off unless a site absolutely needs it and most pages load much faster, plus having it off blocks Flash.
I tried NoScript, but it was a huge pain in the ass. Online videos wouldn’t play and when I clicked the icon, I got a list of about 10-20 different domains that I could enable scripts for. After going through the entire list in the order that seemed most likely and enabling all of them, I found that the only way to get videos to play was to allow all scripts, at which point NoScript would warn me “DANGER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOUR COMPUTER IS AT RISK!!!!!!!!!! YOU’RE NOT SAFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Well, gee, maybe if it was easier to fix all things that it breaks, I wouldn’t have to disable it completely on every other site.
On the other hand, I’ve had Java disabled since I installed the extension and have never once had to enable it.
March 11th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
@RW
“I installed an extension that added a button for Java and a button for Javascript to the bottom of the window. ”
Could you give me the name of that extension?