
How I survived one week without an adblocker - bitboxer
http://bitboxer.de/2011/11/27/how-i-survived-one-week-without-an-adblocker/
======
rickmb
There are two things wrong with this article.

First, it doesn't even mention that without an adblocker your being tracked
all over the place by advertisers. (A practice that is btw clearly illegal in
many countries, even if they haven't explicitly wrote it into the law yet.)

Second, but this is more subjective, I have a rather different experience with
turning off adblockers. Almost every website becomes several times (!) slower,
and is full moving distractions trying to get my attention. Sorry, I can't
read that way offline, and I won't read that way online. Only when advertising
stops disrupting my experience and is only passively present (like it is in
old-fashioned dead tree publications) will I turn off the adblocker.

I the mean time, I only make exceptions for sites that a) understand I have no
obligation to download their ads, and ask nicely, and b) are very careful
about the ads they put on their site.

~~~
yaix
Opt-out here:

<http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp>

Or disallow cookies from ad networks, so they can't track.

~~~
za
Firefox addon that does the same thing, albeit on a superset of advertisers:
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco-
tar...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco-targeted-
advertising/)

------
Achshar
Am i the only one who never uses an adblock? I have two reasons for that,
first is that it seems unfair to use a site and not pay back in a meaningful
way. Almost like stealing. Second is that i don't visit a huge number of
unique sites every day and the ones i visit are respectful enough to not make
nuisance. I rarely come across any super annoying ad. I am kind of surprised
how others simply take it for granted that everyone else uses an adblock. I
have been living very well without an adblock for last 5 years.

~~~
VMG
But don't you actually have to _click_ the ad to help the site?

~~~
gyardley
There's three main ways people buy online advertising:

\- cost per thousand impressions (CPM) \- cost per click (CPC) \- cost per
action (CPA), where the action is something that takes place after the click,
like signing up for Netflix.

If the ad buy was CPM, using an ad blocker takes revenue from the site they'd
otherwise receive. If not, not.

------
enobrev
I believe it was after reading a discussion here on HN that I began a similar
experiment. It's been almost a week and I agree with bitboxer's assessment
overall. Most of the ads seem to stay out of the way.

Some are overwhelming or at the very least a bit annoying. The first that pops
to mind is space.com - which kept showing a footer ad even though I clicked
the "X" - but that's only my immediate example because I'd been to that site
more yesterday due to the Mars launch than I have in quite some time.

I noticed that a lot of newpapers seem to have ads that make me want to turn
and run away. The full page ads with the "Click to continue" link at the top
right. Forbes.com comes to mind immediately. Those ads are repulsive and make
me never want to return. And while on the subject, any site that shows a 10 -
15 second video ad before a 15 second video clip will no longer get any of my
attention, links, clicks, etc.

If I'm going to continue to try to use the web with ads enabled, I have to
draw a line as to what is and isn't acceptable. I haven't tried bitboxer's
fork yet, but it sounds like a step in the right direction. To take it
further, it might be useful (to owners and visitors) to have a means for site
owners to find out whether they are explicitly being blocked and hence losing
potential income due of obnoxious advertising.

~~~
bitboxer
Yes, an information for site owners why they are blocked would be great. But I
don't know how we could implement this in a good way. If someone has Ideas in
this direction I would love to hear them!

~~~
enobrev
Since most ad blockers are whitelist-only, I assume that people using a
blacklist ad blocker are explicitly blocking sites with annoying ads. Of
course that's merely a generalization based on how I think I would use it.

If the stats are shown historically, a site owner could see that after a
redesign or some changes on their site, or maybe after signing up with a new
ad vendor, that there was a spike in their ad blocks and rethink their design
or deal with said vendor.

I don't know if any of this would play out as I'm visualizing it, but I do
feel opening up the conversation between site-owner and visitor to figure out
what can be considered useful advertising is good for everyone.

------
kevingadd
I spent a long time browsing without an ad blocker. I only started using one a
couple years ago after getting hit by a 0-day exploit in an advertisement on a
major website.

Now I whitelist the sites that I know don't host third-party script/media
content (basically, text/image-only). There aren't many of them,
unfortunately.

At present my two choices are: Send ad revenue to websites I like and get my
machine owned by exploits, OR, browse without worrying about those exploits
AND without the annoyance of advertisements. The latter is a vastly superior
choice, even if there is some moral argument to be made about how I'm
depriving those websites of revenue.

If someone has a sound technical solution for this problem, I'd love to be
able to uninstall adblock plus. It tends to erroneously hide non-ad content
sometimes.

~~~
code_duck
>If someone has a sound technical solution for this problem

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux> works pretty well. I'm not trying to be
pedantic, of course - Linux is immune to Windows exploits, of course, and
cross platform exploits, such as for Flash, generally don't work unless
specifically targeted against Linux, which in practice doesn't happen on a
scattershot distribution method like an ad network.

~~~
mkr-hn
That's not a sound technical solution if you prefer or need a different OS,
like Windows or one of the Apples.

~~~
michaelcampbell
Nothing is a sound technical solution if you prefer or are required to be in a
situation where it is not possible to employ.

------
rubergly
As I began reading this, I thought "ugh, someone making hyperbole about how
terrible they thought ads were on the web" (I seriously doubt anyone has been
able to do NO adblock-free browsing in 10 years, while using VMs, other
computers, family computers, etc.). And then I read the part about clicking an
ad, and... wow. I've never thought to click an ad before. Even an ad for a
product I want to buy right then, I assumed would take me to some shady site
or the main site only via some shady pop-up or something. I kind of really
want to see what clicking ads does now.

~~~
billpatrianakos
Same here. Most of the time the sites with the most annoying ads are ones you
wouldn't want to frequent anyway so you rarely deal with it. To me ads are
just there and I skip over them. Sometimes they catch my attention but they're
really not all that annoying. It seems that adblocking is something that was
more useful back in the 90's. These days ads are pretty unobtrusive for the
most part. There's a bit of pop over here and there for some newsletter they
want you to sign up for but it takes less than a second to click out of and
they load fast and only display when fully loaded. I thought this was a lot of
hyperbole too.

------
xd
Even if ads are less obtrusive then they once where .. the thing that really
annoys me when using a browser without an ad blocker is page loads getting
hung up waiting on responses from ads.somedomain.com

------
grot
So ads are less annoying now than they were a couple of years ago...

Is it perhaps because they've adapted to the increasingly common practice of
adblocker(and browsers which prohibit unprompted javascript popups)? Let's not
forget that adblocker is a great thing, if only because it incentivized a move
towards less obtrusive ads.

Another thing: ads may be less visibily intrusive but things like tracking
cookies are still widely (100%?) used. So if privacy is any sort of a concern,
an adblocker is probably still a good thing to have.

------
vladoh
I don't understand how such thing could be on the front page of Hacker News -
this is ridiculous. It's sooo hardcore to browse the web without an
adblocker... and survive. I'm sorry, but this is not what a site like HN
should be about...

------
DanBC
I like this article. I'll have at look at the forked ad-blocker sometime.

It depends on the type of site you visit, but most sites realise that ads are
hated and obnoxious ads can cause visitors to leave.

Punishing bad ads, and letting site owners know that they lost a visitor
because of the obnoxious ad, is important. Whether that'll counteract the
hordes of idiots who'll happily click those ads (see "evony" my lord) is
another matter.

------
soult
> I actually clicked on an advert that interested me. It was the ad for a
> computer game I wanted to buy. And after seeing the trailer on the ad-site I
> bought it.

I would not be so sure about that. Without seeing the ad, you might have never
watched the trailer. Or maybe a week later when you see the trailer for a
different reason you suddenly realize that there is a better game you want to
buy. Advertisements are sneaky that way.

I have Adblock enabled and don't ever want to disable it. Those few times I am
on a different computer/working inside a virtual machine are enough to stumble
upon many ads that are intrusive and annoying. I really wish advertisement
would go away alltogether. Of course this won't happen anytime soon, but
alternative ways to reward website creators like flattr, paypal donations,
beerware license or a simple subscription model are getting more common.

------
wazoox
I also use adblock to blacklist everything facebook. I don't have an account,
and was often waiting for some fb.com stuff loading on pages. I've whitelisted
ads on a handful of sites that explicitly and politely asked their users to do
so (reddit, osnews,but NOT arstechnica).

------
jvdh
The world on its head, we need an article on hackernews to tell us how 90% of
the users are experiencing the web. ;)

------
Brajeshwar
Adblock for Chrome -
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjoc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom)
have an option where you can "Show ads everywhere except for these domains..."
(screenshot - <https://skitch.com/brajeshwar/gmw2e/adblock-options>). Isn't
that what you're looking for?

~~~
bitboxer
That is the manual approach the Adblock Plus had, too. But I have added a nice
gui method for that in my fork :) . In my fork you can simply click on the
adblock plus icon in the url bar and activate the adblocker for that site.
Behind the scene that will add the site to the list you show in that options
screen.

------
yaix
Glad you found out that just because a small minority is abusing the system,
its not a good idea to destroy the income stream of all sites. I would love to
block people that block the ads on my sites. I respect my users by placing
only relevant and non-intrusive ads. If a user doesn't respect me by blocking
all my ads, they can find their information or entertainment somewhere else,
for all I care.

~~~
mkr-hn
You lose the chance to prove your value to someone if you block them. I
usually whitelist sites that I find useful. I've had Penny Arcade whitelisted
for years.

~~~
yaix
I can't block them, there is no way to do that reliably.

But if I had a brick-and-mortar store, I also wouldn't hand out free products
to people who tell me "I may pay the second time".

~~~
click170
Detecting a hidden DOM element, as described in a comment above, that wouldn't
do it?

~~~
yaix
But that's only asuming JS is enabled.

------
younata
My 'adblock' is simply not having flash enabled. I haven't seen a particularly
annoying ad in ages.

~~~
mkopinsky
Is there a way to disable flash but whitelist domains whose flash assets I
will display? (Meaning I want to whitelist the domain actually serving the
asset, not the page displaying them.) I suspect that approach would get rid of
90% of flash ads, while still allowing me to watch youtube or play the
occasional flash game.

~~~
Skalman
Flashblock (for Firefox) does this.

------
cpeterso
An easier solution than forking Adblock Plus to add per-site configurations
would be to create a custom filter list. Instead of subscribing to popular
Adblock lists like Fanboy's List or EasyList, create a minimal filter list
that just blocks the most egregious ads. I'm sure quite a few people might opt
for such a list because they hate annoying ads, but feel like that want to
support sites they like (by viewing their ads).

------
Joeri
I don't understand why you would single out ads. For me the whole experience
of a site is what counts. If a site gives me a bad experience, whether due to
ads or something else, I don't visit it anymore. Most news aggregators put the
site you'll be visiting next to the link, so if you keep an eye on that you
can use your brain as "negative experience blocker".

------
gcb
adblock is a waste of time.

i use 3 browsers, a mobile phone, a tablet... i would go insane with something
unpractical as adblockers.

Just use this instead: <http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/>

work with any browser, any OS.

~~~
ImprovedSilence
Interesting concept. I see this list has been updated recently, do you know if
it gets updated regularly?

------
dbbo
Please look up "where" and "were" in a dictionary. I couldn't focus on the
content of the article because I had to reread every sentence containing one
of those words.

