

An approach to fair ad blocking - haasted
http://adblockplus.org/blog/an-approach-to-fair-ad-blocking

======
windsurfer
Mice want cheese. If you put a mouse at the start a maze, and cheese at the
end of it, a mouse will likely go through a maze to get the cheese. It will
likely pay attention to the maze to try to figure out how to get through
faster next time. But if the mouse can figure out how to get around the maze,
maybe by climbing over a wall, don't be surprised or angry. The mouse doesn't
like the maze at all; it's just an obstacle. The mouse just wants the cheese,
not the maze.

Advertisements are like the maze. In early days, people were forced to sit
through them in between parts of shows on the radio. Print ads had to be
looked at so that people could find the articles. Nowadays, people are able to
get around these 'mazes'. Morally, people might want to support the content-
creators, but if you ask any newspaper executive or journalist, guilt can't
get you very far for very long. Technology has enabled the blocking of
advertisements, and a few mice have had a taste of the easy-to-reach cheese.
These mice will almost certainly not go back to trudging through the maze as
they did before.

Many critics offer a better solution: Make the mice _want_ to go through the
maze. This is certainly a more difficult solution than making a banner ad with
a logo. It requires a fair amount of creativity, time, and effort. But some
advertisers are already doing this. Take a look at the Burger King games:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt2do5oV2-8>

Burger King has made their brand fun and engaging, making the consumers _want_
to consume the advertisements. In fact, they pay for them! Now isn't that
ingenious?

Another example is woot.com. People want to buy stuff, suppliers want to sell
stuff. They connect at Woot, and are directly engaged with the product.

This is the way marketing is supposed to work. Plastering noise and garbage on
a webpage _will_ drive your users to clean it up. They _will_ find a way
around your maze.

~~~
axod
Most people don't think like this. People click on ads every day. millions of
clicks. That doesn't help them get the cheese, it helps them find out about
new cool products they didn't know about. Those adverts are useful to them.
They are glad to have adverts.

That's why people who block ads stand at 6% of firefox users, which amounts to
maybe 2% of total users. Hardly worth worrying too much about.

It's like the people who tell you every second how they haven't owned a TV for
years, yet fail to grasp the fact they're nothing like the average joe.

For some reason adblock users seem to consider themselves as 'early adopters'.
They're not.

~~~
windsurfer
"Most people"? Really? I think you should read this:
<http://www.smvgroup.com/news_popup_flash.asp?pr=1643>

"Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and
households with an income under $40,000," the study said, and they "are also
relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites
– a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."

"heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50%
of all display ad clicks."

Sure doesn't sound like most people...

~~~
dsingleton
A lot of advertisers don't want to reach those people though. They want to get
their brand in front of influential 20-somethings, not to get clicks, but to
generate brand awareness.

------
huhtenberg
His suggestion makes certain sense, but ...

It's not the ads on a _specific website_ that I don't like, it's the _specific
ads_ on all websites. Also it's not just the ads, it's also the tracking
contraptions including javascript bloatware and such. It is far easier for me
to just keep blocking them altogether than to rely on a subjective opinion of
a webmaster if his ads are annoying or not, and not know what it is exactly
that gets unblocked.

------
jrockway
The day they add this feature and enable it by default is the day I fork ABP
and distribute it without that feature.

Yup, I know this is "stealing". I don't care.

~~~
axod
I like the fact most websites are free.

You know what pisses me off far more than any advert in the world? The fact
you have to _register_ to read an article on the nytimes website. Can't be
bothered. If the web can't monetize through advertising, expect far more
moronic walled gardens.

~~~
jrockway
"Delete domain cookies."

But actually, I subscribe to the NYT, so registering for the site doesn't
bother me. I'd rather get something I pay for than get a bunch of crap I don't
want (ads) just to read an article.

~~~
axod
What if you had to register with 100 websites?

~~~
jrockway
What if the Earth exploded and everyone died?

~~~
axod
yeah I think my scenario is _slightly_ more probable.

------
raquo
If this feature becomes popular among webmasters (it should, as many use only
Adsense which is usually far from intrusive), it will become annoying for the
user.

I see a possible solution in tracking users' decisions to show or disable
supposedly unintrusive ads. This way ABP will be able to see which websites
likely abuse this feature and which websites are likely fair in claiming non-
intrusiveness. So, in 'obvious' cases ABP could make an automatic decision to
show or hide the ads.

P.S. I hope the above is readable.

------
hollerith
I will not tolerate ads, but will pay money to be able to access certain web
sites. I see the purpose of Adblock Plus as being to force site owners to
provide an alternative (e.g., subscriptions, micropayments, whatever) to ads
for people like me. So, the way I would like Adblock Plus to restore the
balance to be more fair to site owners is to refrain from blocking ads on
sites that give the surfer some practical way to contribute to the cost of the
web site without being exposed to ads.

~~~
axod
They'll more likely ignore you, notice their CPM is low, and make the ads more
intrusive for the rest. Well done you.

If a site is using intrusive or irritating advertising, don't visit it.

~~~
narag
If sites ignore individual users' behaviour, wouldn't it be naive to do
something expecting to change their advertising patterns?

OTOH, if blockers are such a tiny minority, why are you so concerned?

~~~
lucumo
> OTOH, if blockers are such a tiny minority, why are you so concerned?

I'm concerned by the general decline of morality online.

------
axod
>> "A webmaster should insert this tag into his pages if he thinks that the
ads used on his site aren’t intrusive. "

Erm in what way is that fair? How about the default being that you assume
websites won't do intrusive crappy advertising,

and only block ads on the minority websites that persistently abuse that
trust.

~~~
Angostura
That _is_ the Web's default. It's users that make the conscious decision to
over-ride the fault by installin AdBlock.

FWIW, I never block ads because I'm happy to have free content and pay an ad
tax.

------
dejb
All I've ever wanted from adblock was a 'Disable ads on this site' button.
Maybe they could even make it social so a central list of blocked sites could
be generated.

Normally I'm happy to see the ads. For me it is part of the experience.(Maybe
I'm biased in this way cause I work in online media). But there are certain
sites that have crappy ads that take too much from the experience.

------
VBprogrammer
His proposal seems fair enough to me. But I don't use an ad-blocker. I vote
with my feet as they say and don't revisit sites which have a poor signal to
noise (useful content to annoying ad) ratio. I personally find those sites
which have genuine annoying ads are those websites with a poorly aligned moral
compass anyway!

------
snprbob86
Why not put algorithmic constraints on what is an acceptable ad?

For example, acceptable ads are:

1) Text only, no larger than the average font size on the page 2) Non-animated
images under a particular size 3) Not served by blacklisted domains 4) Or
listed by a whitelist-----

\-------- _screeecchhh_ stopping myself right there, new thought:

What about a plugin which annotates ads with thumbs up and thumbs down
buttons. Do what the Gmail "Report spam" button does: develop reputations for
advertisers, products, domains, etc. There is probably a great market resource
business in here too somewhere....

I guess the summary of my post is that there must be a win-win-win solution in
here for users, webmasters, and advertisers.

------
deno
Hi Hacker News! (my 1st comment here ;)) How about this solution: Make AdBlock
to think more. Now it's every ad or no ads situation. How about middle ground?
AdBlock would block only very irritating ads, these ads that tend to pop up on
screen, animated ads (you can "deanimate" them, privoxy already implement
this) and very big ads. Maybe we can have some way measure how much of
advertisements given page contains? If site has 50% of ads we can reduce them
to half of it. Also, adding something like <img adblockpriority="(0-6)"/>
might help.

So, what do you think?

------
ErrantX
Theoretical question (loosely related) if it is ethical to remove adverts from
"free" websites is it ethical for those websites to ban ABP users from the
site?

How far does that argument go?

(I am not sure my position on it TBH, thought I would throw it out to you
lot).

~~~
jfarmer
I'd say "yes" to both questions. I should have control of my computer and how
it displays data, and you should have control over whom you send that data to.

Everything else is a cost/benefit analysis.

------
enneff
I honestly hope advertisting does die a horrible death. I liked the web a lot
more before it was commercialised.

~~~
tdm911
Unfortunately the web as we know it would largely not exist without
advertising revenue. Think of all the free services we enjoy each day, they
are all funded through advertising of some description.

If there were no advertising on the web, I can't help but feel it would still
be nothing more than a large internet newsgroup/forum without much that makes
it the rich experience it is today.

~~~
hollerith
Did you experience the internet before ads? If not, you might be surprised by
how rich the experience was.

~~~
tdm911
I started using the web around 1995, so I guess that depends on what time
period you are referring to. I certainly didn't use it before the first
graphical browsers appeared!

I guess my point is things like Gmail, flickr, last.fm etc would struggle to
exist on subscription only. Perhaps we can do without them all though?

Also, I agree with the poster below with regard to finding content these days,
it can be tedious. A search on a subject can find pages of aggregators,
e-commerce sites and little in the way of true content. I don't find this the
norm, but it happens.

~~~
enneff
Flickr _does_ exist on subscriptions only.

------
Ardit20
_As I stated many times before, my goal with Adblock Plus isn’t to destroy the
advertising industry._

I'll play the devils advocate, with conflicting interests, so

Nope, your goal is perhaps to earn money on the back of the webmaster and that
might be considered theft. Some ads are intrusive, yup very. Example in point,
the economist. It has so many ads, I hate being on that website for more than
a bit. What do I do, click away. Problem solved. I still have the power you
see, without necessarily punishing the other webmasters who aren't as
intrusive.

Now, of course it is a free market economy. The advertisers want sales so they
become intrusive, the publisher wants revenue so they hold the ads, the
visitor wants free content so he bears the hassle, or of course being smart
installs an adblock and leaves the previous two in cold water. Fair enough,
power to him who has the knowledge that such option exists, but no need to
come back playing the fox saying you do not really want to give them such
option. You clearly are providing a service and that service is attracting
only low subscription currently, if it was higher subscription then your
service would go cold as the webmasters would adapt. But seriously if by
definition a blocker of ads does not destroy advertising then perhaps it
should change the name to blocker of something else.

P.S. No wonder I hardly get revenue from Firefox users, perhaps as a way of
regression every webmaster should block the smart firefox users and be stuck
with the hell of internet explorer.

~~~
axod
It's quite simple to detect and block only adblock users if you wish. It's
about 6% of firefox users on my webapp. Or you could show them "Donate here if
you're not prepared to see my ads" links everywhere.

~~~
Ardit20
How do you do so? I am not a programmer although have some experience of it,
just a curious guy who happened to stubble upon this place with people which
seem at least able to share a love for umm 'thinking' :P . I do not plan to
implement a blocking of them guys, as I said fair to them, they have the
knowledge and are not quite a threatening statistics. I'll save the time load
for this thing I am trying to figure out of how to automate the change of the
most viewed articles.

~~~
axod
Simple method would be to try and load content from often blocked domains and
see if it loads properly or not using js. I did this a while ago and measured
the 6% firefox users using adblock.

For example:

    
    
      // cb = function to call with result
      function detectAdblock(cb) {
          var tt = document.createElement("div");
          tt.style.display = "none";
          document.body.appendChild(tt);
          var i = document.createElement("iframe");
          i.src = "http://adv.foo.com/ads/-adspace?ad_id=&affiliate=&advert=678";
          var foo = i.style.cssText;
          tt.appendChild(i);
          window.setTimeout(function() {
              cb(foo!=i.style.cssText);
          }, 200);
      }
    

This works because adblock is pretty primitive and just checks for keywords in
the iframe src, and if there sets the visibility or display css style etc.

To get around adblock, you can proxy through your own domain, and stay clear
of showing the ads in iframe/image/flash. Use js to put them in with
everything else as text links which perform far better than any other type of
advertising anyway.

~~~
dsingleton
There was some discussion on Reddit recently about ABP usage figures
([http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8j4c7/we_create...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8j4c7/we_created_a_plugin_for_jquery_jplayer_that/c09gqbb)).
My rough estimations came out at 6% of FF users having ABP installed, sounds
like that was about right.

Out of curiosity, what kind of audience does your site have? Particularly tech
savvy?

~~~
axod
Pretty tech savvy yup. Like 75% of so firefox users.

