Adblock Sells Out
erco
Posts: 20,256
As Matrix's Persephone said, "Such a (free) thing was not meant to last." https://www.yahoo.com/tech/s/adblock-sold-reportedly-allowing-companies-030215711.html
Comments
Down side is, the poor user has more data flowing, more delays in web-page loading, which was not what the salesmen promised...
As always, the BIG print giveth, and the fine print taketh away.
I've always suspected that ad blocking software worked mostly by just manipulating the hosts file. Several sites maintain updated lists of the ad servers, so you could create a hosts file manually, but HostsMan works pretty well as a free solution.
"Click on the ABP icon, select "Edit Preference", select the "Filter Subscriptions" tab, uncheck "Allow some non-intrusive advertising."
I wouldn't mind ads if companies didn't always try pop ups, screen covering, and audio etc. If you have something that looks interesting and I don't think I'll get a virus I just might click and see. But once you get in my face I'll never buy from you until all other options are gone.
I found that option shortly after posting. I do recall that Adblock just asked a day or two ago if I wanted to update to the latest version, and I did. Seemed like my desktop was running slow today, not sure if they are related. IE was giving warnings that Adblock was slowing page loads by 4+ seconds. That can't be right...
Same here!
What I hate is animated ads, huge ads, overlapping ads, and, most of all, irrelevant (to the site) ads. When going to phys.org I absolutely don't want to see ads for ukranian women, or pseudo-science (latest quantum crystal healing powered water medicine or whatnot). And most of all I don't want to see site-irrelevant ads 'targeted' to my browsing history.
That's the problem with the web advertisement industry: they lack a lot of common sense and gray matter. They are simply not very smart. That's why I block all of the junk. It's not because I don't like ads.
-Tor
In general, anything that throws another image or screen in front of info that I am trying to read is offensive, and I won't participate or endorse.
We are simply at a crossroads where advertising has provided a lot of the free services we have on the Web, but businesses are now growing frustrated with not getting actual sales. So they become more aggressive and more offensive.
The whole impasse seems to point toward some sort of crisis and eventual sea change.
+++++++++++
Yahoo seems to have a thing for hair restoration. I guess it is a steady revenue source, but the same ad lurking at every log in and pretending to be news is rather absurd.
It's all very simple really.
ABP's has had acceptable ads allow/deny for quite some time now.
Sounds like the real problem is that there are a lot more entities paying them to get passage through the filtering. And, somehow I am quite sure that down the line the allow non-intrusive ads option will go away to be made default, or some chicannery will occur behind the scenes to somehow allow ads through for those willing to pay.
For every nutter who's pulled his ad blocking app off of the App store after making the $100K, theres got to be several competent coders who hate ads enough to code something up like ABP.
Somewhere someone is coding a OSS like Adblock Edge that will not be able to be bought out, and we'll be able to keeps ads out.
I have no ethical qualms about blocking every ad, everywhere. If your business model can't handle that, then you need to go under or find a better business to be in. The net would be a far better place if there was a significant culling.
I agree. The few times I need to use IE11, (This is being posted from Chrome) I find that all of the ads shown are irrelevant. I find the most offenders present on two sites, one happens to be the one for PCH, and the games they insist will help someone win their latest windfall, and the other is from my e-mail service.
Online advertising is still stuck in the same mindset that was very popular here in this country during the period immediately after the generation described by certain rock groups, (both US and UK based), and into the period we have now, where someone called it the "DUH!" generation.
Sadly video advertising is still confused. But that's for a different discussion.
Thing was, everything had it's place. Ads were ads and articles were articles. When you were done reading the content you scanned the adds if you had time and especially if you wanted to buy the components described in the articles.
I'm sure the same was true for those journals dedicated to cat breeders or model boat builders or whatever.
In this modern world it's all messes up. Ads are stuffed in every corner of every story on the net. Am I watching a Bond movie or a commercial for Heineken?
What I find disturbing is that I see the same adds everywhere I visit on the net. The algorithms have decided they know all about my wants and desires and stuff it in my face all the time. I'm living in a nightmare bubble of my own creation it seems.
It's really eye opening to surf to your regular haunts from a public terminal as an anonymous human. All of a sudden you see there is a whole other world out there!
Block them all as much as possible I say.
I'm curious, "...period immediately after the generation described by certain rock groups..."
What rock groups are you referring to? I cannot pin point the period in time you are talking about.
The Beatles, The Who, and even Rolling Stones. What was enjoyed by any individual here, and were native, that is a US group had little influence. But they also added to the upset.
Interesting. As far as I recall at the time of the British invasion of The Beatles, The Who and the Rolling Stones into the global music world I was very much into The Doors, Love, Steppenwolf, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Canned Heat, The Velvet Underground, even The Monkeys.
Give or take a year or so, heck I was only 10 at he time, yanks were all over music.
As far as I can tell nothing much has changed since then. The music industry, copyright law, the whole system is still in place and operating as usual.
Only nobody bothers to make music any more
What I'm getting at is that advertising, both online, and off, haven't changed their mindset. They just refuse to believe that none of the community here, is interested in that garbage.
The pop music industry is all about selling records. (OK we don't have vinyl records now but we have iTunes etc. and it was all about player piano rolls and sheet music before that).
In order to sell records you have to advertise the sound that is on them. People have to hear it first.
So, it helps to have pop music radio stations to advertise your product to the world 24 hours per day. The modern equivalent is the web.
Now here is the magic part...when a pop radio station is playing a song to you, they are actually running a commercial to entice you to buy the record. The song is it's own advertisement. But...and this is where it gets very clever...the record company does not pay the radio station to run it's ads for them. On the contrary the radio station has to pay the record company to run that add for them. It's copy righted material, you have to pay to play, right.
Besides I believe there are laws against "payolla" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola thus ensuring the radio company has to pay to run the ads for the record company.
Neat, isn't it?
OK, I have no idea how this relates to the modern day web exactly, but we have a similar global medium and the same wall to wall annoying advertising as we had back in the day.
Fair enough.
I run the some ads option, and it has been just fine. I see ads that largely make sense and they don't break the experience.
I also think that service is worth paying for. If they get too greedy, an open one will take over.
I do dislike the term sellout. It can't all be free in our current economic climate. The term is appropriate for excessive greed or raw exploitation. Other cases are just necessary business. The latter sees the term way more than warranted, IMHO.
Won't ever happen. We need options.
If only advertisers would get smart, that's what we're asking. For their own sake.
Then I would have felt my subscription money was actually useful. I stopped my tech/audio/music magazine subscriptions due to the high ad-to-article ratio.
an overload of matching ads. That's when I stopped my subscriptions. But before that I found the ads useful. I still like to view ads or pages with PCBs populated with electronic circuits.
So what happens is people must run ADS to compete. Not doing it just isn't acceptable for the vast majority out there. And they are competing for a slice of near fully consumed pie. When they are successful, they get a bigger slice, and in general, some other slice will shrink. Addtionally, people who produce ADS are competing for a similar pie, and those who can show results get the majority share of AD budget dollars.
Our marketing budget, which includes some ADS, at the little company I'm managing is 10K every quarter. The people responsible for marketing and advertising only have two requirements: 1. they must spend it, 2. they need to quantify what they believe they will get by spending it. Actually, that makes for a third requirement, and that is to collect the data and compare with expectations, but I'll be helping out with that, so it's not all on them.
So what is going to happen over time, and they are new to this as the company didn't have a formal budget prior, is they will discover what sells and once they do that, they will maximize that. If it's a loud, annoying approach, there will be a business decision. Take the money, or treat the people right. We actually will treat the people right as we are a lifestyle product company. Annoying the peeps won't work well. It would deliver a short term gain, but longer term loss. It's toxic, and we know that.
Notice Apple runs very few ADS? They understand this mess and selling quiet is part of their overall strategy. Not many grok this and are in a position to leverage it. Apple does, and is. My little company actually is, and we need to be careful about it, or we won't be anymore. That latter dynamic is what a lot of companies do not understand. Once a brand goes loud, or that "line" is crossed to the point where ADS are not adding value, it's largely done. Race to the bottom. LOUD will rule.
But some products sell no matter what, or have crossed the line, and for those, it's gonna go right to the brash, bold, LOUD, annoying ADS, and there isn't anything to do about it, until we see economic changes, or pass legislation. An example of legislation was "loudness" metrics on TV ADS. The companies gamed the legislation with careful audio processing with a net result of zero on TV ADS. We still hate 'em. And there are more of them because the higher dollar amount for really punishing ADS had to be replaced by greater volume....
This all sucks hard. Hate it.
We saw a similar impact in music sales. Loud productions sold more, and would outsell otherwise great productions. As we left the 70's, great production fell aside in favor of choice. This was made worse by digital distribution which put all the music into competition, back catalog sales vs new sales. Overall, sales would be sales though. People have what they have to spend on entertainment and to a large degree luxury items.
Most music got LOUD and much more poorly produced.
LOUD, in your face, can't get away from 'em ADS, outsell well produced ADS, and the same dynamics are in play, resulting in a lot of ANNOYING ADS.
And on a side note, Neil Young sees this, hates it, and is trying to reintroduce the idea of well produced, higher margin music. So far, he's seen limited success. Maybe he should consider partnering with Apple, who could do this.
What does this mean: Sadly, in the majority of cases, they won't be selling more goods, unless they adopt a careful strategy like Apple currently employs, and that is only possible some of the time too. What they can do is sell for greater margins, which is what Apple does. In many niches, this just does not work, and the LOUD AD wins. Really, it does. That is why they are there.
Consider the music in both versions of Fantasia, or even the music in a certain Kubrick film and you're spot on.
Strange.... We have not seemingly heard from erco. His opinions are being requested.
We may be in the age of the last megastars because of this. Taylor Swift may be the last of that kind of musician.
What Apple did was also disallow many of the most annoying AD forms. This was a reasonable balance, and that was acceptable to a lot of people running iOS. The game has changed, and Apple had to allow blocking software as the balance was disturbed.