I can only speak for myself but a solution does not seem that far off (at least not to get me to see your ads). While I agree that some sort of code of conduct may be a good idea, I don't really see it working out in the long run what with everyone always being willing to sacrifice good will for a quick buck.

That said, I use NoScript in Firefox and I run it for other reasons than blocking advertisements and I don't have an ad-blocker installed. If I white list a website it means I made a deliberate choice to trust whatever it is going to throw at me. The most important thing here is that I did not allow any third party to serve me some random code (plain markup is fine). I have no way of telling whether the site I just white listed in fact knows what their external advertisers actually serve. And this is proven again and again by how site owners expect visitors to contact the site when they see an ad that is intrusive so that they can "nuke it". This to me makes it a no deal.

To kill two birds with one stone: Serve your advertisements from your own servers and if I want to read your content I have to make a choice whether to trust you and your webserver(s). If you violate my trust then I will go elsewhere and I am no longer a waste of your resources and you are not a waste of mine.

If I have for some reason decided to not let you run dynamic content on whatever device I am currently on you simply have to respect that or I leave. You still have the opportunity to serve me static ads, surely that's got to be worth something. You don't know my reasons for not white listing you (as this article states as well). What surprised me about this link was that I did not see a single advertisement on the page. This means they are all using JavaScript or Flash. Sorry, your loss. And eventually my loss as well since the website might not live to see another day due to lack of income.

Adobe has abused our trust with a third party cookie blocking mechanism that just doesn't protect us without essentially making Flash worthless on many sites where we do want to use it. One of the few ways around it is to use NoScript to block JavaScript driving Flash by default, and then allow the ones we want to allow one by one. But why would I allow an ad network to track me across web sites just because I like Ars Technica?

So asking us to unblock Flash? Wow, I love arstechnica, but they know better than asking us to do that.

We are being asked to accept a particular type of ad technology that is fraught with problems, it's not ads we're blocking, it's widely abused technology that we're blocking. It's not for the pretty animations that Flash is used in many ads, it's for the third party cookies that track across sites.

It turns out that only about 20 rules covered 99.5% of the _really_ annoying ads, whilst still leaving the OK ones. Adding those rules wasn't difficult, or annoying, or time consuming - just click and block when irritated.

Witness Adsense, which started off with text only, but now has full flash capabilities.

What is the solution to the problem? I don't think there is one.

The way I see it, there is an implied contract between a website and a viewer. The website says, "well you get to look at my content for free and you will not have to pay for all the work I have done creating the content and serving it to you, but in exchange you should see and consider the various advertisements and deals we are offering."

Ad blocking means the market will never correct itself. You're cutting off the feedback loop.

If an ad annoys you, just don't visit that website again! Simple. It's not like there's a shortage of websites to visit.

If there's an article on here from nytimes, I just don't bother with it any more. They have a paywall/subscription thingy and I just can't be bothered to google for login details.

If an ad annoys you, just don't visit that website again! Simple. It's not like there's a shortage of websites to visit."

Doesn't this depend on how ad blockers work?

If my browser fetches some HTML, and it includes an img ref to some ad site, my blocker might a) prevent the fetching of that resource, or b) allow it to be fetched, but block the rendering.

I'm pretty sure blockers use the first technique. So, visiting a site with an ad blocker ups a site's hit count, but adds nothing to the eyeball count for the ads. Fro the ad-tracking POV, it's as if you never visited.

It may very well be the sort of feedback that's needed.

If you really want to be more active about this you're better off writing to the site owner with your concerns than simply not visiting the place.

Can you explain why not?

Unless there's some explicit prior agreement, I have no obligation to use my resources to render something in some specific manner, or at all.

Online ads fall into the same technological mismatch as online music. It's the application of solid-to-the-touch thinking to a fluid digital medium.

Web pages are not print. Don't base your business model on a different medium. (Ask the RIAA how well that works out.)

OK, but the assertion was that it was unethical, not that it was unreasonable.

2) When an ad annoys you, enable your ad blocker for that site.

"Right-click on a banner and choose “Adblock” from the context menu — the banner won’t be downloaded again. Maybe even replace parts of the banner address with star symbols to block similar banners as well."

How about this as an alternative:

If you install adblock "Fingers in ears" (ignore everything), you're not even giving websites a chance. You're not even giving them the benefit of the doubt that they could ever provide you useful advertising. You're assuming they're going to annoy you, so you're sticking your fingers in your ears.

You can sort of see why that's disheartening to people who are trying to provide useful advertising.

I personally think installing adblock is a crappy move. It's like walking into a conference with hands over your ears incase someone tries to sell you something. You just look like an idiot, and lose out.

It's sort of common courtesy to not assume someone is going to irritate you when you meet them. That's why, when we meet new people, we don't cover our ears, we extend them goodwill, and assume they're going to be nice.

  if (youDontLikeAdsOnWebsite()) {
      dontFlippingGoThereThen();
  }

  if (youDontLikeMyBlcokingAds()) {
    dontFlippingServeMeAnyContentAtAllWhenIMakeAnHttpRequest();
}

If you don't like it, don't consume the resources of the site serving the adds. This idea that your entitled to the content, without actually 'paying' for it (you pay by giving up a bit of privacy to heighten the value of the ads) is just wrong in my world view.

Selling people's privacy is part of an ad company's revenue stream. Ad networks pay sites to post ads. Sites make money, in part, from selling their user's privacy.

Now we can argue the semantics of whether the act of visiting a website is considered private knowledge. I'd argue not - it's like walking into a shop, the shop has the right to say "hey you know who was here earlier?". But at the end of the day "they are selling my privacy" is over dramatizing what is happening. By visiting any website you run the risk - how do you know they are not selling the IP logs directly etc.

Visiting websites is just, within reason, public knowledge.

I also wonder how many advertisers actually use the data to target ads - and how much of it is used simply for numbers tracking (I dont know either way but it would be interested to see). I mention this because, when I run w/o ad blockers I don't really see anything actively targeted at me.

  If you don't like it, don't consume the resources of the
  site serving the adds

I suspect part of the problem is for sites like this is that when your top story for the week is the new Ubuntu colour-scheme, then your users probably are not going to pay for your information and analysis.

Also if you're using whitelists, they will only track you on the sites that you're choosing to whitelist, so it's not as if whitelisting Ars will immediately allow them to track all your moments.

Then PDF and flash player exploits started showing up in ads on high-traffic websites. After a couple close calls (only averted thanks to my particular system configuration), I installed AdBlock and FlashBlock. I blacklist both ads and flash content by default.

Websites I can trust to serve me ads that aren't going to try and root my machine get whitelisted so that all their content shows up. All ads based on Project Wonderful fall into this category, since they only serve text and images. Google Ads would have also fallen into this category, but they're not safe anymore since I've seen them serving up Flash.

I'm perfectly happy with sites not liking my approach. They can show me a message asking me to turn off my ad-blocker (and I might, if I'm willing to give them a chance and I'm interested in their content), or refuse to serve me content entirely. That's fine.

An advertiser is going to pay as much for ads as they can profit from them. At the end of the day, the advertiser wants to spend less on ads than they make in profit from running those ads - they don't care about # impressions, # clicks, or whatever. If an advertiser can make $1.01 profit for every 1,000 random ad impressions, they'll pay $1 or less for those 1,000 impressions. If I can identify half my audience that will never respond to the ad, I'm essentially making $1 for 500 impressions instead of 1,000. I'll happily pay $2 for 1,000 of those more effective impressions.

The question then, for a for-profit site, how do you monetize the freeloaders? I thing the answer is: 1. Try to get them to upgrade to a paid subscription. 2. Create highly targeted ads based on the content, and integrate them with that content (ie not from ad servers). Unfortunately, this is only a cost-effective option if you get a high volume of traffic). 3. Restrict freeloaders from using your most expensive resources. I don't imagine a site like Ars is very bandwidth intensive, but if an adblocking user is costing them a lot in bandwidth for some reason, they could provide the content without the images, for example.

It's unfortunate that there's the collateral damage that affects non-obnoxious sites; and, while I whitelist the sites I frequent, and many here may as well, I'm sure we're the minority.

That being said, here's about as close to a real-world analogue for my thoughts as I can get: in NYC, I'm sure there are people in Times Square trying to gain signups for Greenpeace and other "ethical" purposes mixed in with the other people hustling CDs, comedy club tickets, and the like, but I just ignore everyone as I walk by, wholesale, because stopping and seeing what everyone's about will turn a brief walk into a pain in the ass.

Then I'm going to run an ad blocker. I visit how many sites a day? What percent at any given time are in their "sometimes" phase?

You run annoying ads, I get annoyed, I do what I can to stop being annoyed. Don't run annoying ads, I don't get annoyed, I don't take action to avoid the thing that isn't annoying me. Done.

  if (user.usingAdBlock()) {
     showMessageTellingThemWhyItsBad();
     ShowDonationOptions();
     offerDegradedExperience();
  }

So this group decides to block ads and when the content producers decide to degrade their content (which is their right), they get pissed?

eventually, people will be saying "wahh..why do I have to pay for my favorite site..it used to be free".

My problem isn't that ads are blocked. If you want to block a site's ads, this is fine. However, these adblockers are blocking ads on pretty much every site that uses them. Many ads are getting blocked on sites that the user has never even seen. How do you know that they are intrusive if you have never even seen the ads?

"(though Ars avoids most of the more annoying rhetoric), attempting to blame someone else for the fact that their business model no longer works, instead of finding a new business model."

What an amazing coincidence that his bandwidth-reduction strategy also happens to get rid of annoying ads. And how convenient that he can blame AT&T's bandwidth cap for hurting sites like Ars.

Historically, most web ads seem to have the first view. "Why, of course! All I have to do is treat the visitor like crap: store 75 cookies, throw up new windows, flash some animations, play loud noises, and trick them into clicking on things. Then they'll surely want to shell out cash for my products!"

The problem is, after seeing a few of these, I'm not going to spend time weeding out the good from the bad: it's like junk mail, after awhile it's just thrown away, and it doesn't even matter anymore if there might be a hidden gem.

I can only assume that a scam is being pulled: that there are ad managers who create annoying systems to meet artificial quotas, and then show their employers how many "millions of clicks or page views" they received. That way, they can demand huge sums of money for all the "exposure"; in reality, I'd be surprised if the ads do much good. If a site is "dying", it's not because visitors block ads, it's because companies are falling for the scam and paying advertisers who are essentially being offensive and misleading about their numbers.

Here are examples of effective ads:

- Hulu, because they made reasonable compromises to respect visitors. For example, they have far fewer commercials than an equivalent TV show, and an ad is often displayed "up front" to minimize interruptions later.

The perfect platform for paying for stuff: music, software, books and web reading...

It needs to be something I only set up once, not once per website. It should probably be integrated into my browser so I don't have to find the button on the webpage (and then type in my password or something -- it better be one click).

Of course feel free to continue with ads for the people who don't block them.

You may object that people don't care and won't pay. But the article is saying "please don't block ads as a way to voluntarily pay". If you think sympathy or voluntary payment will work, set this up as a superior option for people to pay with.

  rm -rf ~/.flash
  mkdir ~/.flash
  chmod -rwx ~/.flash

Advertisers, the people who bought the ad, are paying for impressions in the hope of converting them into revenue. An impression spent on me has absolutely zero chance of ever generating any revenue or any other kind of value. This is a safe assumption that has held true in my decade or so of browsing the web. The impressions that I block are spent on someone else, where they have at least the potential to lead to conversions. Thus, I am helping the advertiser make more money.

The ones who lose out in this situation are the middle men: the agencies, networks and content providers. Though their impressions become more valuable, they have less of them to sell and this apparently works out to a loss. However, appealing to my sympathy about this is nonsensical. They are simply asking me to help them sell worthless impressions to some third party. I would never feel inclined to do that, no matter how indebted I felt to the content provider.

Ad supported sites who complain about blocking fail to see the big picture. Their entitled thinking goes no further than "when you do this, I get money, so you should/must do this".

If internet advertising is not sustainable in the face of ad blocking, then it is not sustainable at all.

Then, funnily, they offer this analogy: "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."

This model actually worked well for hundreds of years until the advertisers found that online advertisement could be cheaper and more effective than printed paper advertisement.

> Imagine running a restaurant where the food is free, and your business model is getting a cut of the mariachi band's tips.

I would like such a restaurant and would gladly give the mariachi a tip. What I definitely wouldn't do is go there with a smug on my face as if it's my right to eat there for free.

I don't use ad-blocking at all ... websites that get too offensive I just stop visiting. Tried an ad-blocker for a month ... but with an ad-blocker active it's harder to punish the bad guys, while rewarding the respectful businesses. And flashy advertising is also a good indicator for (the lack of) quality.

How'd they do that? Ads are annoying, and many people I know never click on internet ads. For us (perhaps a minority, I don't know) ad-blocking leads to a better internet. We're probably the ones referred to in the article who are happy to help a website out if they ask for it in another way.

Those who spy do not call it spying, it is those upon whom the spies spy who rightly call it spying.

Spies call spying a slew of disarming terms: Forensics, investigation, probes, intelligence, surveillance, research, observation, analysis, data gathering, data analysis, data mining, log filing, system testing, polling, questioning, interrogation, looking into, checking, double-checking, reviewing, verification, authentication, testing, evaluation, protection of the customer, the citizen, the nation, and more misleading terms being invented and deployed all the time.

Apologists for spying have an ancient and wide range of justifications for the practice and never admit it is not needed or wanted by the targets of spying. Instead, spies have forever claimed their offense is on behalf of the innocents who do not understand how dangerous the world is.

Now, like any other corporation, they have a product which they sell to a market. The market is advertisers -- that is, other businesses. What keeps the media functioning is not the audience. They make money from their advertisers. And remember, we're talking about the elite media. So they're trying to sell a good product, a product which raises advertising rates. And ask your friends in the advertising industry. That means that they want to adjust their audience to the more elite and affluent audience. That raises advertising rates. So what you have is institutions, corporations, big corporations, that are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses.

Content from 3rd party ad servers almost universally does not. They are designed to be as attention-grabbing as possible, stealing the resource of attention from your readers, and SHOULD be blocked.

My idea is a web app that big sites can drop on their servers where advertisers are the users. Advertisers get dynamic quotes from the system based on length coverage etc and demand by other advertisers during the same time, and can upload their ads directly to the sites server. Each site hosts the ads from THEIR web server in the same manner as they do their content images (without javascript) so they should be unblockable.

Fixed.